but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment

he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you

or your days: they will be wrong,

they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,

all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,

you slept, you awakened.

Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gratefully thanks the publications in which many of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different versions:

The American Poetry Review: “After Long Silence,” “Ask Much, the Voice Suggested,” “Between the Material World and the World of Feeling,” “The Destination,” “The Heat of Autumn,” “Hesitation: An Assay,” “I Imagine Myself in Time,” “I Write These Words to Delay,” “‘It is night. It is very dark,’” “The Meeting,” “The Promise,” “The Refusal,” “Theology,” “Two Washings”

The American Scholar: “‘Of’: An Assay,” “To Gravel: An Assay,” “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning”

Atlanta Review: “Envy: An Assay,” “Not Only Parallel Lines Extend to the Infinite,” “Ryoanji: An Assay”

The Atlantic Monthly: “The Bell Zygmunt,” “Pyracantha and Plum”

Columbia Journal: “Downed Branch,” “Flowering Vetch”

Forward: “Translucence: An Assay”

The Georgia Review: “‘Ah!’: An Assay,” “‘And’: An Assay,” “Evolution & Glass,” “Global Warming,” “Lighthouse,” “Tears: An Assay,” “To Sneezing,” “Tool Use in Animals”

Green Mountains Review: “‘To’: An Assay”

The Kenyon Review: “After Degas,” “Character and Life,” “A Class Almost Empty,” “The Complaint,” “Ecstasy: Czechoslovakia, 1933,” “ Listening,” “Lemon,” “Sentence,” “Why Bodhidharma Went to Motel 6”

Literary Imagination: “Against Certainty,” “One Sand Grain Among the Others in Winter Wind”

Lyric: “Study of Melon & Insect”

MiPoesias: “The Immortal,” “Pocket of Fog”

New England Review: “Dog Still Barking at Midnight,” “In a Room with Five People, Six Griefs,” “Vilnius,” “What Is Usual Is Not What Is Always”

New Letters: “Red Scarf,” “Sky: An Assay”

The New Yorker: “It Was Like This: You Were Happy”

Nightsun: “Bad Year,” “Dog and Bear”

Orion: “Beneath the Snow, the Badger’s Steady Breathing,” “A Man Walks Through His Life,” “Sheep’s Cheese”

Ploughshares: “Bonsai,” “Each Morning My Neighbor Walks Out,” “The Mountain,” “Termites: An Assay”

Poetry: “Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant,” “To Judgment: An Assay,” “To Spareness”

The Princeton University Library Chronicle: “The Double”

Runes: “Burlap Sack”

Shambhala Sun: “Lighthouse,” “The Monk Stood Beside a Wheelbarrow,” “Serrano Pepper”

Slate: “Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt,” “Possibility: An Assay,” “To Opinion”

Speakeasy: “Maple”

The Threepenny Review: “A Day Comes,” “Letter to C.,” “Poe: An Assay”

Tin House: “The Story”

Tricycle: “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead”

TriQuarterly: “Articulation: An Assay,” “This Much Is Promised”

Vallum: “Jasper, Feldspar, Quartzite”

Water-Stone Review: “Once: An Assay,” “To Speech,” “Wanting More and More to Live Unobserved, Unobserving”