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

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

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…

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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…

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

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…

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

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