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,

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

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

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 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…

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

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

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

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…

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