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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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…

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