Index of First Lines

A certain happiness exists despite
       
86

A Romanesque bridge joins one hill
      
65

All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed
     8

And yet the morning light held you, the cuts
      
47

Another poet scoffed when I said
       
72

Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher
    14

Daughter, you are more delicate
        
18

Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed   66

Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way
    54

For him, there is only one poet: his wife
    
93

Freezing to death is not an act of love   52

Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77

Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode
    33

How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108

I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr
       
56

I have a whole cache I will one
day      
62

I have washed too many I have watched
    38

If joy could screeve from lung and marrow
   23

Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16

In your eyes along the streets can I see 64

It is not as if the sun and
I           
90

It would be as the wind, but some force
     49

It’s not custom to begin with the couplet
     40

Just when it seems she will sing deport   45

Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend
    32

Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some   100

Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out
    74

My heart is even lonelier than my face   80

Nostalgia and utopia, past and future  
     68

On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk
    
76

On the brink of simile I faced
     
98

Our whatever is an asymptote and not   89

Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France
    
88

Palm trees came to France in 1864
      
51

Remember our mothers who bore us
     
83

Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones
   87

Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds
    82

Silent devotion at first light, wind
       
59

So much depends on the glibness of words,
      
55

So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me  10

Something rebarbative lives in this life   94

Son, you were allergic to filberts then   17

Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger
    11

The absence of your breath heats my marrow   42

The angles of the moon over, through those trees
    41

The aspersion she cast cuts deep: the
times       
15

The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died
    109

The boughs lay withered beyond the brow
    1

The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71

The closer to the ground, the more
fictional    58

The clouds lie over the land near Avignon
    70

The country is not pastoral: it was
       
67

The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park
    13

The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79

The dog beyond the gate barked, as if  22

The embarrassment of words abandons
us    43

The fen stretches out like prairie, the
canals   6

The garden in the ruined abbey brims   4

The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant  102

The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice  44

The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape
   101

The nuclear power plants smoke over the land   69

The renitency of the will opposes all
      
26

The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25

The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape
     27

The season of our wooing, a stillness now
    84

The shadows of the evening still across 92

The sparrow on the trough is world enough
   3

The speculation of music has
         
103

The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road
    20

The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard 28

The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75

The way trains move, poetry moves
      
61

The white cliffs above Cassis
     
91

The wind was slapping the water, and the surf   105

The winds rise over the plain outside Paris
    35

The windows of the moon have cast
      
29

The winter of our breath was the blue   9

There was a window on the stars, the cusp
   31

There was jazz playing in a room away 34

There were stones there were knives
     
39

There’s something about a train that is
like    97

These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age
    95

They married looking out to sea, the west
    7

They were quartering us in these streets
    
30

This harvest is the sap that moves in us 21

This night, like the vanity of death
       
50

Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones
    60

Through the threshold the pollen draws, the
light    
46

Till we fled Calais these two
terrains      
36

Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves
    19

We rose from dust on a day not of our 104

What is not said in the garden
     
2

What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106

When I was young the world was young: you know
   48

When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed
    57

Who would hear me above the surf, the remains
     78

Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun
    73

Window night-frame time of the moon   37

Winter has its verges, not a green snow
    
81

World, breath, disinherited us,
even      
85

You don’t have to be Richard the Third
    
107

You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect   12

You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24

You see before you a man more ridiculous
    63

You watch the dying light after the star 96

Your arms are not a trope, and
hyperbole    53

Your face was the chalk in these
hills      
5

Your heart is knapped flint, or is it
mine?     99