In Praise of the Tear Glands

Goodbye

What Came Next After Our Father’s Death

Part Two

Ghazal Confessional

White Boy in Pajamas, Big Sur Inn, Gulf War

The Communicant

Bianca Helps Me Clean My Attic

5 o’Clockface

Improv

If I Were to Sing Myself,

Into Tahoe

this is just to say

To Chase, After the Diagnosis

To Chase, During Her Surgery

All of a Sudden, I See, and My Heart Sinks

What I Look Like

Dream Near the End

5 Elegies

Part One

Transformations

Her Brother

Confessional (for S.B.)

That Goddess

Wasn’t Afraid Of

Looking for Galway on the Vermont Mountainside

Suddenly

After Reading Shallcross

Part Two

When They Say You Have Maybe Three Months Left

Heroin

When the Cancer Has Come Back, Sleeping in His House with Him but Not in His Bed with Him

His Birthday

His Voice, a Week Before His Spirit Follows His Voice Out

Three Views of Him Asleep, His Final Days

The Preparing

The Box

After an Epitaph on an English Headstone

Can’t Sleep

Komodo

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the following publications in which a number of these poems previously appeared, sometimes in slightly different form.

“A Song Near the End of the World”: The New Yorker

“My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together”: London Review of Books

“Anatomy Lesson for the Officer”: Iterant

“Not Once”: Poem-a-Day: The Poetry Foundation

“Meditation During the Sufferings and Deaths of Others”: Prairie Schooner

“Quarantine Morning”: The Paris Review

“339th Morning of My Easy Quarantine”: Iterant

“X-Ray & Rats”: Prairie Schooner

“Sprung Trap”: Iterant

“Amherst Ballad 1”: Hunger Mountain

“Amherst Ballad 2”: The Southern Review

“Amherst Ballad 6”: Gulf Coast

“Amherst Ballad 8”: The Night Heron Barks

“Amherst Ballad 10”: Prairie Schooner

“Best Friend Ballad”: The Threepenny Review

“Paper Doll Ballad, for Fats”: A Gathering of the Tribes

“Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop”: The American Poetry Review

“Ballad of Once Mike Carter”: Prairie Schooner

“Spectrum Ballad”: Hunger Mountain

“Genesis”: Narrative

“Bad & Crazy”: Prairie Schooner

“Ghazal Confessional”: Gulf Coast

“5 o’Clockface”: The Threepenny Review

“Transformations”: The Southern Review

“Her Brother”: The American Poetry Review

“Wasn’t Afraid Of”: Harvard Review

“When They Say You Have Maybe Three Months Left”: The American Poetry Review

“Heroin”: The Southern Review

“Three Views of Him Asleep, His Final Days”: Gulf Coast

“The Preparing”: Narrative

“After an Epitaph on an English Headstone”: The Southern Review

1

Quarantine

Quarantine Morning

Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palms

and soles, bent far forward, I see

my shins closer than usual—

their indigo and red-violet fireworks,

their royal blue wormholes—

how much difference is there, anymore,

between me and a cadaver?

I know I won’t come, after I’m dead,

though it does seem a little strange, to me,

and strange that what we learned in Seventh Grade Health

is not a structural part of each of us like heart-beat and breath,

though sometimes people die of a heart-attack in bed.

I think my mother’s father did, with his mistress,

then they said to his wife he had fallen down the cellar