It was early May, I think a moment of lilac or dogwood when so many promises are made it hardly matters if a few are bro… My mother and father still hovered

The gathering family throws shadows around us, it is the late afternoon Of the family. There is still enough light

Finding a new poet is like finding a new wildflower out in the woods. You don’t see its name in the flower books, and nobody you tell believes

I remember what my father told me: There is an age when you are most… He was just past fifty then, Was it something about the trees t… There is an age when you are most…

After Adam Zagajewski I am child to no one, mother to a… wife for the long haul. On fall days I am happy with my dying brethren, the leaves…

When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away

I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its…

I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand

For Jews, the Cossacks are always… Therefore I think the sun spot on… is melanoma. Therefore I celebrat… New Year’s Eve by counting my annual dead.

1. THE SACRIFICE On this tile the knife like a sickle-moon hangs in the painted air

I am only leaving you for a handful of days but it feels as thought i will be gone forever the way the door closes

Perhaps the purpose of leaves is t… the verticality of trees which we… as if for the first time: row afte… yearning upwards. And since we wil… ourselves for so long, let us now…

When they taught me that what matt… was not the strict iambic line goo… over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produ… on the ear by the surprise of diff…

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book