Barter: POEMS

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments Earlier versions of some of these poems have appeared in the following magazines and anthologies: TheAgni Review:“Self-Portrait with Critic” The American Poetry Review:“A Brief History of the Century,”“An Uplifting Story,”“BackThen,”“In Siena,”“Interim Report,” “The LethalTraumas ,”“Long Island,”“Mahler,”“Material,”“In the Old Days,”“The New Russia,”“Scenario,”“The Soul” Best Poems of 2002, ed. Robert Creeley (NewYork:Scribner’s,2002):“SelfPortrait with Critic” The Colorado Review:“Iran/Iraq” Fence:“At the Creek Club,” “The ColdWar” The Greeensboro Review:“I ForgetWho Compared the Soul” The Hampden-Sydney Review:“At the Frick” The Kenyon Review:“Jazz,”“What Kind of Man” My Business Is Circumference, ed.Stephen Berg (Philadelphia:Paul Drey Books, 2001):“DidYou Ever Get a Phone Call” The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, ed. Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly (Hanover, N.H.:University Press of New England,2000): “Honeymoon in Florence” The New Republic:“The Ex-Husband” The Paris Review:“Like Angels,”“Nature” The Princeton University Library Chronicle:“Kindertotenlieder” Webdelsol:“The Brightness” TheYale Review:“Nefarious” • • • Thanks to Jane Mead, Claudia Rankine, and Laura-Gray Street for their valuable suggestions in helping me shape this book. [blank page vi] To Linda and to Mickey Mizner and the memory of her husband, John But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, the fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more.And we too, just once.And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. —rainer maria rilke, The Duino Elegies ...