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,

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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…

Into the gravity of my life, the serious ceremonies of polish and paper and pen, has come this manic animal

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.

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