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

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…

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,

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…

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…

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,

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

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

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

We think of hidden in a white dres… among the folded linens and sachet… of well-kept cupboards, or just ou… sending jellies and notes with no… to all the wondering Amherst neigh…

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

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

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