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For Trisha, Eliza, and Sophia Beloveds All
Contents
4 It’s not magic; it isn’t a trick
7 The poem is written on the body
12 I want to go back
13 How easy to give up hope
14 There’s nothing occult going on
15 Can a river flow beside itself ?
16 When Sappho wrote
17 How radiant and pale
18 Salt on the roads melts
19 The river has a single song
20 The world comes into the poem
21 Smart or dumb? Who cares?
22 Those who wake
23 If death, then grief, right?
24 Suppose you could evoke
25 Those dreams in which a phantom
26 Everything dies. Nothing dies.
27 Silence
28 The beloved has gone away
29 Some of the poems are clear
30 Tears and laughter
31 Reading and writing poems
32 Lighten up, lighten up
33 Too many mysteries
Part Two
1 To feel, to feel, to feel
2 Sometimes happy, sometimes sad
3 Or is it loss ahead
4 Concentrating on those motions
5 To lose the loved one
6 Even the saddest poems have journeyed
7 Nothing more beautiful than the body
8 Someone else called out
9 Why should the grave be final?
10 Listening to Bach’s solo suites
11 Now the snow is falling
12 It’s winter and I think of spring
13 I never planned to die
14 When my kids look for me I hope
15 How small the eyes of hate
16 How large the eyes of love
17 Scratched with a stick in snow
18 To become the tree
19 Could it all be said in a single poem
20 Who can measure the gratitude
21 When we’re young there’s lots
22 To add our own suffering
23 To hold a pane of glass
24 Nesting dolls
25 Of course, a book about living
26 When you are sad
27 To be alive
28 Calm down, calm down
29 So obvious that the voice can cease
30 Facing away from the light
31 Weeping, weeping, weeping
32 The human heart
33 To loll in a sensual torpor
34 I saw my own body
35 How to exhaust the inexhaustible?
36 Time to shut up
37 We’d only just met
38 Snow on the tree branch
39 Tired of the body?
40 You