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For they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind.      —Hosea 8:7 I. Labor Theodore Thompson Genoways, born June 24, 1907 The midwife says, Bite this strop. Outside, burn-killed limbs— once spread wide as the province of God—pile in cords, sorted from kindling to cook-logs. Lynn tears muslin into even strips, watching Wallace through…

He found them bedded in ice, in the frozen puddles     Among reeds and clumps of sedges in the marsh:         House and field crickets lying near the surface On their sides or upside down, their brittle hind legs     Cocked as if to jump as free as fiddlers         In the final rain before…

Each flake is an old Cape Cod church with its steeple broken off. Still it is possible to locate a hymn within. I was handed a thin porcelain implement by a man prepared to die. He said, They are alike: the baton of the maestro, the whitestick of the sightless.

More than your shirt I’m wearing. More than the wildflowers in the field. The purple will yield to yellow— when it turns red I will not be here to see it. This weight I feel is not the weight of your body. When I touch your skin I am trying to remember it— It is…

The passengers riding the train do not know. Nor do the taxi drivers lining up miles away. But they trust they will meet each other. The yellow cabs inch forward like the hours of a life. Each time a door opens, someone enters.

Laundry strung between high windows, bilious in breezy light. A circle of uniformed boys in a courtyard kicking a soccer ball, and someone upstairs practicing piano. In the dream a ceramic creamer painted with wild sunflowers. Streaks of rainbow plumage from small boats going away. Motor oil. Olive oil. Angels that leap from the mind…

My grandmother is tired. She sits at the foot of my bed and asks where I go. I show her my books, and she smiles at the text for Chinese 101. As I turn the pages, she reads the characters she knows—moon, noodles, peace, fear—and asks about those she does not. “We haven’t learned that…

“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth   Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo             in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward             for your suffering to come to an end….

Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…