“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca
frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to
your pet boa constrictor”
back home in Grosse Pointe,

August, goldenrod blowing. We wal
into the graveyard, to find
my grandfather’s grave. Ten years
I came here last, bringing
marigolds from the round garden

In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I’m coming! Don’t move!
Once again it is April.

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod o
when a grandfather dies.

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow
pressing from a clear bowl. All da
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep

Fifteen years ago his heart
infarcted and he stopped smoking.
At eighty he trembled
like a birch but remained vigorous
and acute.

At the edge of the city the picker
vomits and dies. The river
with its white hair staggers to th
My life lay crumpled like a smashe
Windows barred, ivy, square stone.

Between pond and sheepbarn, by map
Rebecca paces a double line of rus
in a sandy trench, striding on bla
creosoted eight-by-eights.
In nineteen-forty-three,

If he and she do not know each oth
they will not meet again; if he av
if she has grown insensible skin u
only the tribute of another’s cry;
as revenge on old lovers or famili

When the young husband picked up h
in the taxi one block from her tow
first lunch together, in a hotel d
with a room key in his pocket,
midtown traffic gridlocked and was