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

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

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book

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

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…

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

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,

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

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…

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 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.

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…

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