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…

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…

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.

I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand

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

I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its…

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

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…

Because the shad are swimming in our waters now, breaching the skin of the river with their

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

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

The gathering family throws shadows around us, it is the late afternoon Of the family. There is still enough light

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