Contents
Wrecking Crew
The Poem You Asked For
Magician Poems
L.A., Loiterings
For Stones
Fish
For the Country
The Town
Maybe the Dead
Unfinished Poem
The Afterlife
Rhododendrons
The Double
Signs
Inventing the Toucan
Readings in French
A Poem of Horses
The Crimes of the Shade Trees
Linnets
The Dollmaker's Ghost
Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard
The Ownership of the Night
To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969
Truman, Da Vinci, Nebraska
Edward Hopper, Hotel Room
My Only Photograph of Weldon Kees
For Miguel Hernández in His Sleep and in His Sickness: Spring, 1962, Madrid
For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles
García Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery, 1966
Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923
Some Ashes Drifting Above Piedra, California
For a Ghost Who Once Placed Bets in the Park
Overhearing the Dollmaker’s Ghost on the Riverbank
Blue Stones
The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing:
Winter Stars
The Poet at Seventeen
Adolescence
The Cry
Winter Stars
Irish Music
Family Romance
Though His Name Is Infinite, My Father Is Asleep
Childhood Ideogram
In the City of Light
My Story in a Late Style of Fire
After the Blue Note Closes
Whitman:
Some Grass along a Ditch Bank
Two Variations on a Theme by Kobayashi
Those Graves in Rome
The Assimilation of the Gypsies
Sensationalism
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
The Spell of the Leaves
Sleeping Lioness
Slow Child with a Book of Birds
The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence
To a Wren on Calvary
The Widening Spell of the Leaves
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
Elegy
The Two Trees
In 1967
The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
Anastasia and Sandman
Shiloh
Boy in Video Arcade
The Smell of the Sea
Elegy with a Petty Thief in the Rigging
Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage
Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand
Elegy for Poe with the Music of a Carnival Inside It
Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope
Afterword by David St. John