When bent oaks briefly blossom into glory.

Oh, yes, it was a story beyond telling,

And so it had to end, as legend required

In blood and tears and fire, the grim fates smiling.

We had our years of ecstasy and rage,

And then moved back to other tamer tales.

But my hand still burns touching this page.

MARRIAGE OF MANY YEARS

Most of what happens happens beyond words.

The lexicon of lip and fingertip

defies translation into common speech.

I recognize the musk of your dark hair.

It always thrills me, though I can’t describe it.

My finger on your thigh does not touch skin—

it touches your skin warming to my touch.

You are a language I have learned by heart.

This intimate patois will vanish with us,

its only native speakers. Does it matter?

Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire

performed the sorcery we most required.

They bound us in a spell time could not break.

Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep

our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy.

What must be lost was never lost on us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The new poems in this collection, sometimes in slightly different versions, have appeared in the following journals: “An Old Story,” “Come Back,” “Monster,” “Progress Report,” and “Style” first appeared in the Hudson Review; “Household Gods,” “Title Index to My Next Book of Poems,” and “My Handsome Cousin” were published in Radio Silence; “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” appeared in First Things; “Marriage of Many Years,” “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy,” and “Vultures Mating” were published in the Sewanee Review; and “Film Noir” and “Meditation on a Line from Novalis” first appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review. “Homecoming” is a revision of “The Homecoming” from The Gods of Winter. “Most Journeys Come to This” was originally published in Daily Horoscope under the title “Instructions for the Afternoon.” “Film Noir,” “My Handsome Cousin,” and “Homage to Soren Kierkegaard” also appeared in limited editions by Aralia Press. Artichoke Editions printed a folio edition of “Sea Pebbles: An Elegy.”

The author wishes to thank all of these editors and printers for their generous support.

NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The poems in this volume were selected from my first four collections supplemented by fifteen new poems, one of which is very long. 99 Poems has been arranged by theme, not by chronology, because it is designed for the reader rather than the scholar. Within each section, however, the poems appear in chronological order with the new work at the end. The index lists the volumes in which the individual works originally appeared.

—DG