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The poet Mark Doty discovered an old mirror in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel. The heavy glass and its aging silver weren’t reflecting very well, anymore, “This mirror resists what it can, too weary for generosity. As if each coming and going, each visitor turned, one night or weeks, to check a collar or the angle of a hat, left some residue, a bit of leave-taking preserved in mercury. And now, filled up with all that regard, there is hardly any room for regarding, and a silvered fog fills nearly all – the space, like rain: the city’s lovely, crowded dream, which closes you into itself like a folding screen.”

Mark Doty, to many the poetic chronicler of the AIDS plague, turns his glass outward in a new collection, called “Source.”

Guests:

Poet Mark Doty

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One year in office, more than six months since the tragedy, and the Bush Administration roars along, retaining an 80 percent approval rating on its governmental report card. But in the teacher’s comments column, a familiar refrain: “Does not play well with others, Reluctant to share.”

Increasingly, members of Congress are asking for more information, for the chance to question presidential advisors, for the chance, as they put it, to see how the taxpayer’s money is being spent.

There are questions about the “War on Terror,” about homeland security. But the Bush axiom that “you’re either with us or against us” seems to extend to elected officials who ask the wrong questions. The legislators, the executive, and the great gulf of silence in between.

Guests:

John McGinnis, professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, and former deputy assistant attorney general during the Reagan and Bush administrations