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

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

The door of winter is frozen shut, and like the bodies of long extinct animals, cars lie abandoned wherever

Because the shad are swimming in our waters now, breaching the skin of the river with their

I married you for all the wrong re… charmed by your dangerous family h… by the innocent muscles, bulging l… weapons under your shirt, by your… the colors of painted scraps of su…

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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…