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

We think of hidden in a white dres… among the folded linens and sachet… of well-kept cupboards, or just ou… sending jellies and notes with no… to all the wondering Amherst neigh…

When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away

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

The door of winter is frozen shut, and like the bodies of long extinct animals, cars lie abandoned wherever

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

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…

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

Finding a new poet is like finding a new wildflower out in the woods. You don’t see its name in the flower books, and nobody you tell believes

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…

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.