Heaven & Earth Holding Company

Contents

ContentS i . . . must i remember? . . . 3 Undiscovering America 4 Girl with Her Tongue Stuck Out 5 Just a Tranquil Darker 6 When Dylan Left Hibbing, Minnesota, August 1959 7 High Tide 8 Romance 9 Keats 10 Upon Reading in Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid that Church Pews in the 1930s Were Made by Convicts 11 Killing Mice, December 12 Sorrow 13 Watson 14 Upon Reading that Abraham Lincoln Spent His Summer Nights as President at a Cottage on the Grounds of the Soldiers’ Home on the Outskirts of Washington rather than at the White House, and that He and Edwin M. Stanton, His Secretary of War, Spent the Better Part of One Evening in 1864 Freeing Two Peacocks that Had Become Entangled in a Tree 15 Love Field 16 Poem to Be Read at 30,000 Feet 17 Man Drowns 18 Overflow 19 Witness 20 Them Shoes 21 Elvis, 1955 22 On the Occasion of My Two-Year-Old Granddaughter’s First Attempts at an Elvis Impression, I Recall the Difficulties of Her Birth viii ii . . . crawling between . . . 25 At the Optometrist’s Office 26 Night Rain 27 After the Reading, Driving Back to Massachusetts with Jim Beschta, I Think of the Men Who Hold the World in Their Hands 29 Sleep Comes to Mary Todd Lincoln 30 Driving Back from Crotched Mountain, Winter Storm, New Year’s Eve 31 Brief History 32 For the Man with the Erection Lasting More than Four Hours 33 Upon Reading that a Noisy Cloth Factory Separated the Family Homes of Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci 34 On Bethlehem’s Plain 35 Look, Look 36 For Lou Bishop, the Drunk Who Lived up the Road 38 History 41 Throwing Out the Marriage Bed 42 Teachers 43 News 44 Lisbon 45 Sirhan Sirhan 46 The Grief Counselor’s Day Off 47 Finding My Dead Father at the Worcester Art Museum ix iii . . . in your philosophy. . . 51 Girl on the People Mover 52 Cross-Country 53 Yale 54 Saints 55 Bootleg 57 Mr. Muckle 59 Upon Reading on a Flight from Atlanta the Latest Slang Term for the Act of Defecation 60 Upon Seeing a Former Lover Pull Up Next to Me at the Intersection of Metaphysics Lane and Memorial Drive 61 Upon Reading a Poem Entitled “Upon Seeing a Former Lover Pull Up Next to Me at the Intersection of Metaphysics Lane and Memorial Drive” 62 On Hardly Ever Hearing Anyone Say Boy, Howdy Anymore 64 Easter 65 Blind Boy, Fourth of July 66 London Letter after the Subway Bombing 68 Dog Dying 69 Jackstaff, Jackstraw (tack and jib) 70 Upon Reading that Tatiana Yakovleva, Mayakovsky’s Lover, Separated from Him by the Stalin Purges, Had Married and Was Four Months Pregnant when Mayakovsky Killed Himself 71 Declaration 73 Acknowledgments ...