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Note to the Reader
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observing his progress through glasses that moments before
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Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.
This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.
To absent friends
As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. And they two went on.
2 Kings 2:6
Contents
1 I
6 Bad News
8 Potatoes
13 Changing Drivers
14 Snapshot
15 Two
16 While We Were Passing
17 Gabardine
18 The Woman Whose Husband Was Dying
1 II
1 Estate Sale
2 Opossum
3 A Backyard Fish Pool
4 A Visitant at Five A.M.
5 A Jonathan in Spring
6 Dead Bat
7 Sundial
8 Birdhouse
9 Tree Frog
10 Lantern
11 Dead Fly
12 Garrison, Nebraska
13 A Mouse in a Trap
14 A Wasp’s Nest
15 Tree Removal
16 Barn Swallows
17 Zinc Lid
1 III
1 At a Kitchen Table
2 A Morning in Early Spring
3 Closing the Windows
4 The Past
5 Sleep Apnea
6 First Marriage
7 Grandfather
8 Howard
9 Deep Winter
10 New Moon
11 Hands in the Wind
12 Spanish Lessons
13 Painting the Barn
14 Those Summer Evenings
15 Awakening
16 A Person of Limited Palette
1 IV
1 Small Rooms in Time
2 Right Hand
Splitting an Order
I
Two Men on an Errand
The younger, a balloon of a man
in his sixties with some of the life
let out of him, sags on the cheap couch
in the car repair shop’s waiting room.
Scuffed shoes, white socks, blue trousers,
a nondescript gray