1. Kicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together from the game, in Ann Arbor, on a day the color of soot, rain in the air; I kick at the leaves of maples, reds [...]

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the [...]

In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s floor. He packs wool sheared in April, [...]

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then.                                   [...]

Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft boulders! If one of you found a gap in a stone wall, the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks, wethers, lambs; mothers and daughters, old grandfather-father, cousins and aunts, small bleating sons— [...]

You drag the boat across the tallgrass, shake out the black snakes that made a provisional home under the bow through the length of winter. The rope undone for the first time in months, it [...]

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot, enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and 'tis of thee, [...]

A black cat among roses, Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon, The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still, It is dazed with moonlight, Contented with perfume, Dreaming the opium [...]

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched [...]

The air breathes frost. A thin wind beats Old dust and papers down gray streets And blows brown leaves with curled‐up edges At frightened sparrows on window ledges. A snowflake falls like an errant feather: [...]