When our cars touched When you lifted the hood of mine To see the intimate workings under… When we were bound together By a pulse of pure energy,

January Contorted by wind, mere armatures for ice or snow, the trees resolve to endure for now,

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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

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

We invent our gods the way the Greeks did, in our own image’€”but magnified. Athena, the very mother of wisdom, squabbled with Poseidon

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

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

Some say it was a pear Eve ate. Why else the shape of the womb,

I sing a song of the croissant and of the wily French who trick themselves daily back to the world

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