Someone said my name in the garden… while I grew smaller in the spreading shadow of the peo… grew larger by my absence to anoth… grew older among the ants, ancient

It wasn’t the bright hems of the… that brushed my face and I opened… to see from a cleft in rock His ba… it’s a wasp perched on my left che… my eyes closed and stand perfectly…

When the wind turns and asks, in my father’s voi… Have you prayed? I know three things. One: I’m never finished answering to th…

When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back

Look at the birds. Even flying is born out of nothing. The first sky is inside you, open at either end of day.

He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he

Childhood? Which childhood? The one that didn’t last? The one in which you learned to be… of the boarded-up well in the back… and the ladder in the attic?

Choose a quiet place, a ruins, a house no more a house, under whose stone archway I stood one day to duck the rain.

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s… The garden is bare now. The grou… brown and old. What is left of th… in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.

And when, in the city in which I… even my most excellent song goes u… andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search…

People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.

Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipat…

Alone with time, he waits for his… a boy growing old at the dining ro… pressing into the pages of one of… the flowers he picked all morning in his mother’s garden, magnolia,…