Contents
Acknowledgments
The Rope Was Innocent
<b>I.</b>
The Infant King 
I Knew the Rudiments
The Sound: Seventeen Year Cicadas 
Waiting for a Bus in Baltimore 
The Bruise 
The Nuclear Family 
Bluegrass 
Ambition 
Two Sightings and a Valediction
Wanting Red Hair in October 
The Platypus Dreams Eight Hours a Day 
<b>II.</b>
I Am Talking to You about Love 
Junk
Surface Tension 
The Sad Dream of Peace 
Dinner on the Fault Line
The Woodchuck 
In Nagasaki
The Last One 
Yiddish 
To Hold
Aunt Lily and Frederick the Great 
Anniversary 
<b>III.</b>
The White Meal 
To Tell a Sorrow
A Dandelion for My Mother 
Pauline Is Falling 
Posthumous 
The Stones Were Mute
From a Window in Jerusalem 
Each Dawn¿s Breaking 
My Mother Lies Head to Head
 with Esther Stone 
Elderly Woman Holding a Dead Bird: Surrey County
 Asylum, Circa 1855 
Arroyo Seco: A House at the Crossroads 
The Mountain 
<b>IV</b>
Earth Music
Pottery Urn with Incised Pictographs
Oracle Bone: Inscribed Scapula of an Ox
My Father Did Not Believe
Tomb of MarquisYi of Zeng 
Chime of Twenty-six Bronze Bells
As for the Dog
Jade Shroud Sewn with Gold Wire
My Mother, Likewise 
Pity the Poor Silks
Bronze Cooking Vessel
The Innocents