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…

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

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

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

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

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.

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…

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…

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

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

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

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…