Recommendation

I am recommending that you read Mark Doty's poem "Fire to Fire" if you have not already. It can be found in his books "School of the Arts" or "Fire to Fire". It's a poem that has stuck with me. I love Mark Doty, and recommend that you read whatever you can get your hands on by him, but if you are pressed on time and hesitant to take suggestions (as I have been from time to time) then please at least try to read this poem.

Here are a few excerpts, though I found great difficulty in choosing excerpts at all, to get you going:

All smolder and oxblood,
these flowerheads,
flames of August:

fierce bronze,
or murky rose,
petals concluded in gold-

And as if fire called its double down,

the paired goldfinches
come swerving quick
on the branching towers,

so the blooms
sway with the heft
of hungers

indistinguishable, now,
from the blossoms...

copper circle
around the seed-horde
flashing like a solar flare.

You can't finish looking:
they rear and wave
in pentecostal variety...

If I were a sunflower I would be
the branching kind,

my many faces held out
in all directions, all attention...