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

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

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

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

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…

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

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

I remember what my father told me: There is an age when you are most… He was just past fifty then, Was it something about the trees t… There is an age when you are most…

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 am only leaving you for a handful of days but it feels as thought i will be gone forever the way the door closes

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

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

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