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What shall I say, Lord, now that the words / keep stumbling, tumbling like loose marbles / across the table then down onto the floor...

Before I formed you in the womb, my son, / I knew you. Knew you long before that high / spring day in the sixth year of the reign / of FDR, when the full-leaved sycamores / that frame the tired river that runs East...

And did you really think there would ever come a time / when things would go as you’d dreamed they should? / That you—you!—could hold the reins of some phaeton- ...

Sixteen and a half with a brand new driver’s / license in my wallet, driving my father’s / ’47 two-toned old clunky Pontiac, I turned...

Black velvet darkness, tufts of shredded clouds heading slow- / ly up the coast, the lamp-like February snow moon the host...

Mid-September, dear woman, and the monarch / lights once more upon the purple panoplied / butterfly bush in the now-decaying garden...

A Saturday night, late February. Eileen and me / in the back of the cramped car, Julie driving, / Bruce riding shotgun. We’re heading down...

And then, in an instant, it’s gone: the world of East Fifty-First. / Gone the round-the-clock clack of the Third Avenue El...

A paralyzing gelid vortex of a January morning. / He lay under the covers as the beckoning New Year’s sun...

With my father’s Army ballpeen hammer I’d found / down in the cellar, I kept banging on the swordblade, / trying to turn it back into a plowshare like the ones...

How old the story is, we have come to see, and yet how true. The kid’s back home at last, knowing he’s lost everything the old man gave him,...

In the hot Washington afternoon, in one of those endlessly bustling government offices, there sits a man named Michael J. Astrue, the fifty-four-year-old head of the Social Security Administration....