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

My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
And whom my body warms.
Sweet death, small son, our instru

High on a slope in New Guinea
The Grumman Hellcat
lodges among bright vines
as thick as arms. In 1943,
the clenched hand of a pilot

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

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,

December twenty-first
we gather at the white Church fest
red and green, the tree flashing
green-red lights beside the altar.
After the children of Sunday Scho

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.

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.

Twelve people, most of us stranger
in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari fr
Then two young men, who cooked him
carry him to the table
on a large square of plywood: his

When I walk in my house I see pic
bought long ago, framed and hangin
—de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Hen
that I’ve cherished and stared at
yet my eyes keep returning to the