CONTENTS

from In a Neighborhood of Dying Light (1994)

The Woman in the Peter Pan Collar

A Matter of Trees

True Answers to Sincere Questions

In Ohio

Forcing Bed

What in the World Were We Thinking Of?

The Man with the Ax

Domestic Violence

Snapshot with Flowers

Detroit Drops Two to Cleveland

Bringing Stars Home

Weathering March

Why I Like Baseball

from Consolation At Ground Zero (1995)

The Smallest Cowgirl on Clark Street

The Doll

The Closet

Posing

Abrasion

The Weed Puller

Christmas Eve

Mother and Child Reunion

For Paul Pack, Manager of the Little League East Ohio Vending Team

The Color of the Iris

“The Bag of Life #38”

Accademia: Florence

Piazza San Marco: Venice

Wild Poppies

Cook’s Tour: Rome

Tomorrow We Discuss Cottonwoods

Evangelist with Child

A Mary Haggadot

1. The Annunciation

2. Adoration of the Shepherds

3. Madonna of the Paintings

4. Landscape with Saint John

5. The Crucifixion

6. Christ Appearing to His Mother

7. Death of the Virgin

My Girl

In the Neo-Natal Intensive-Care Unit

Three Dead Birds

The Encyclopædia Britannica Uses Down Syndrome to Define “Monster”

Arkansas Funeral

Alopecia Areata

1. No Other God Before Me

2. Sins of the Father

3. Every Hair Is Numbered

October Frost

December Tulips

Hello

Christmas Morning

Where Shade Comes Down

A Dream of Stillness

Poundian Conclusion to an Otherwise Ordinary Day

Lake Glass

Children in the Bedroom

The Fourth Fact

Consolation at Ground Zero

from The Lecture On Dust (2007)

The Lecture on Dust

Reading the Tao

Open Heart

Reading The Gingerbread Man with My Daughter

My Grandparents’ House

July 5th

Leaving the Neighborhood

Robbing the Dead

The Green One

Plastic Fantastic Lovers

The Man Beside Me

Stir-Frying

Winding My Watch

A Penny for Her Thoughts

Shining My Shoes

Homeless Man in Mom’s Open Kitchen

Paying the Rent

Physical

Vacationing Without You

Interview with a Suicide

Shoshaku Jushaku

Calling Time

Berry Picking

Young Woman Caught Reading in an Easy Chair

Riddle

A Cardinal

One Tuesday

Poem Interrupted by Lack of Light

The End of Modernism

The Bull, the Dog, the Horse

Men Playing Catch at the Beach

Shekinah

Ararat from the Flood

Spring Night in Kent, Ohio

The Leonids

Weeds in Winter

New Poems

Prejudice

Reincarnation

(Un)Sexy Mearns

Stag Hunt

The Six Four Emotions

History of a Shirt

I Should Have Been a Painter

Dying to See You

Refugium

I Thought We’d Never Get Over That First Album

Spite

Definition

Old Tools

The Three Great Ideas of Yacouba Sawadogo

Two for Ko Un

Snapshots of China

“Team Up with Jesus”

Job’s Dream

Notes on a Wren

Redbud

Because of the Snow

Still Life with Lamp and Dogs

Courtship in Wartime

Hoarding

Walking the Beach

The Driveway

Political Poem

Möbius Strip Poem

Not with a Bang or a Whimper

A Dove

Two Robins

Connect the Dots

Leaf Squirrel

The Man at the Dump

Rainouts

Notes

Index