Dancing the Tarantella at the County Farm 13 --
Affirmative Action Blues (1993) 16 --
When I Think About America Sometimes (I Think of Ralph Kramden) 26
A History of Sexual Preference 31 --
Late Words for My Sister 33 --
Your Character Is Your Destiny 36 --
Lawrence and Edison in New Jersey: 1923 40 --
How the Last Act Begins 43 --
From The El Paso Times "World of Women" 49 --
Empress Shotoku Invents Printing in 770 59
Composed Near the Bay Bridge 60 --
what did she know, when did she know it 64
Photographs of My Father 64 --
Letter from Home in Spanish 66 --
from Three Poems in Memory of Mama (Grandmother) Cold as Heaven 67
Out of My Own Pocket 70 --
Like Her Body The World 71
My Mother in Three Acts 72 --
Childhood in Jacksonville, Florida 74
Prayer to the Muse of Ordinary Life 75 --
After Reading Reznikoff 77
In the middle of Priest Lake 79 --
Black Boys Play the Classics 81 --
For Black Women Who Are Afraid 82 --
For Sister Sue Ellen and Her Special Messenger 83
A Night Without Stars 93 --
Halfway Through the Book I'm Writing 96 --
Now and Again: An Autobiography of Basket 98 --
Annunciation in an Initial R 99
Revisionary Instruments I 102 --
She Attempts to Tell the Truth About True Romance 103
West Texas Rain Journal 107 --
Testimony of Light 112 --
Take: A Roman Wedding 116
Valentine Delivered by a Raven 119 --
Nature of Suffering 122 --
Beckian Fritz Goldberg --
Guardian Angel of Not Feeling 133 --
Willow in Spring Wind: A Showing 134 --
Of the Ever-Changing Agitation in the Air 135
Line Drive Caught by the Grace of God 137 --
Tree Falling in a Vacant Forest 141 --
Twelfth Floor West 144 --
Still Life in Garden 146 --
A Boat Down the River of Yellow Silt 150 --
Annotation in Her Last Court Diary 153
Lives of the Heart 163 --
Each Happiness Ringed by Lions 166
Depressive Episode 169 --
Fantasie Metropolitan 172
How Some of It Happened 178 --
Botticelli's St. Sebastian 195 --
Wild Turkeys: The Dignity of the Damned 196
Having It Out with Melancholy 198 --
August Rain, After Haying 201
Early Thoughts of Winter 210 --
Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins 211 --
October, Yellowstone Park 212 --
Meanwhile the Turtle 215 --
Werner Herzog 68 / Iowa City 88 216 --
How Things Bear Their Telling 217
What I Wouldn't Do 220 --
Blues: Late August 223 --
from Lessons 12. Given What Manages 224
After the Storm, August 227 --
Past All Understanding 231 --
Three To's and an Oi 233 --
Etymological Dirge 234 --
Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun 234
All quail to the wallowing 237
Outsider: Minnie Evans 238 --
Genius of Fog at Ecola Creek Mouth 241
Sonnet Against Nuclear Weapons 244 --
Golden Bough: The Feather Palm 248
Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler 249
Late-Born Daughters 255 --
Happy and Unhappy Families I 256 --
Happy and Unhappy Families II 257 --
Animals Are Entering Our Lives 258
For the Reader (Blank Book) 260 --
Self-Portrait as Somebody Else 261 --
At the School for the Gifted 265 --
How I Discovered Poetry 267 --
Sacrament of Poverty 269 --
A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl's Forehead
Mysteries of Small Houses 273
Vocabulary of Dearness 276 --
I Still Have Everything You Gave Me 277 --
Phantom Haiku/Silent Film 282 --
Villanelle from a Sentence in a Poet's Brief Biography 284
Alicia Suskin Ostriker --
Studio (Homage to Alice Neel) 284 --
Boys, the Broom Handle, the Retarded Girl 285 --
from The Mastectomy Poems --
An Early Afterlife 290 --
Why I Am Not a Buddhist 293 --
For Edward Hopper, from the Floor 296 --
Lament in Good Weather 297 --
For I Have Taught the Japanese 297
"I've Been Around: It Gets Me Nowhere" 299 --
Story After the Story 300 --
"Trois Petits Tours et Puis..." 301 --
Before John and Maria's Wedding 309 --
Fast Car on Nebraska I-80: Visiting Teacher 311
Inside Father's Pockets 314 --
Letters to a Young Poet 316 --
What Kind of Times Are These 319
Controlling Factors 320 --
Why Isn't It All More Marked 323 --
Woman Who Wrote Too Much 324 --
If She Only Had One Minute 325 --
A Rainbow Over the Seine 326 --
Absolute September 329 --
Crossing the Square 334 --
Notes from Underground: W. H. Auden on the Lexington Avenue IRT 335 --
Malleus Maleficarum 4 337 --
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death 339 --
Man Who Killed Himself to Avoid August 340
Faithful Daughter Dreams of Spring Break While Installing a Bird Feeder for Her Mother by a Window in the Courtyard of Safe Harbour 345 --
A Heart with Little or No Bedrock for Anchor 346
Absent from Dances, 1925 375 --
Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/2 377 --
Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/3 377 --
Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/4 378 --
Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/5 379 --
Goddess Corn Finds Her Dress in Disarray 380 --
Purple Loosestrife 383 --
Outdoor Chums in the Forest 385
My Taste for Trash 387 --
One You Wanted to Be Is the One You Are 392 --
American River Sky Alcohol Father 393 --
Yield Everything, Force Nothing 394
One Strategy for Loving the World 395 --
Late Flight of the Love God 395 --
So Get Over It, Honey 403 --
Baltazar Beats His Tutor at Scrabble 404
Man, That Is Born of a Woman 409
Learning from the Movies 410 --
Thoughts While Walking 410 --
He or She That's Got the Limb, That Holds Me Out on It 413 --
Song for the Spirit of Natalie Going 413 --
That Been to Me My Lives Light and Saviour 414
You, Failed Pronoun 416 --
Her Body Is Private 417 --
All the Wide Grin of Him 418 --
from Deepstep Come Shining 421.
