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

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the br
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s fl

All winter your brute shoulders st
and steerhide over the ash hames,
sledges of cordwood for drying thr
for the Glenwood stove next winter
In April you pulled cartloads of

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

In the mid August, in the second
of my First Polar Expedition, the
almost upon us, Kantiuk and I
attempted to dash the sledge
along Crispin Bay, searching agai

The clock of my days winds down.
The cat eats sparrows outside my w
Once, she brought me a small rabbi
which we devoured together, under
the Empire Table

Women with hats like the rear ends
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands
who close briefcases and ask, “Wha
I look in their eyes, I tell them

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,
that I dumbly inhabit

Images leap with him from branch t
brighten, his head cocks, he pause
alert.
And when I see him I want to hide
The other wood is past the hill.

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