From The Book of the Beloved and Us, Which Is the Book of Eros -- Even before speech -- Her eye and my "I" -- The world looks -- Hoarding your joys and despairs -- It's all far too large -- Sometimes the beloved's -- When we were young -- There you were -- stalling -- A smile on the face -- "So, who will give -- With your embrace -- And when the beloved -- We could say -- Reciprocity -- that's where -- If to say it once -- For such a journey -- To see the beloved -- Voice of the beloved -- The beloved insists -- Extravagant catastrophe -- Here's "anguish" and over -- Lots of sorrow and a little joy -- I dreamed she'd arrive by -- The journey already so -- There's the daisy: white petals -- Ask the tree or the house; -- Were we invited? -- Bending over spring's first rose -- Hold off, rain -- To be alive! -- When the world -- Wanting it to last -- To loll in a sensual torpor -- Loss and loss and more -- FROM The Book of Loss and Grief -- When we lost the beloved -- There's no use in closing -- Everything taken from us -- Welcome to the kingdom -- To die and yet -- Place the beloved last was -- To learn by heart -- If the world were to end -- When the coffin was closed -- Would I have withdrawn? -- Not to make loss beautiful -- Growing -- To speak too soon -- Love without loss -- What's over is over -- How easy to give up hope -- We let death take him -- Set beside the world's -- When the awful -- It wasn't death I discovered -- If deepest grief is hell -- "Sorrow makes us all -- When the beloved died -- I was asleep in uneasy -- That desolation is the door -- That T-shirt -- it smells -- Sorrow is good; -- So many were given only -- The hug, the clutch -- Autumn again. The leaves falling -- Not the loss alone -- Maybe it's not the end -- First, there was shatter -- In the Navajo origin story -- Oh, I know: the beloved -- FROM The First Book of the Book -- The Book of the Resurrection of the Beloved Imaged as the Story of Isis and Osiris -- Resurrection of the body of the beloved -- The beloved is dead. Limbs -- Who wants to lose the world -- When I open the Book -- It's not magic; it isn't a trick -- Sadness is there, too -- Isis kneels on the banks -- The poem is written on the body -- Oh, there's blood enough -- "What is life?" -- The things that die -- I read the Book for years -- You think I haven't known grief? -- I want to go back -- I saw my own body -- What death shatters -- No longer a part -- To lose the loved one -- There's nothing occult going on -- Can a river flow beside itself? -- Even the saddest poems have journeyed -- Concentrating on those motions -- Love and loss, then life again -- The Book of the Body of the Beloved Imaged as a City Made of Poems -- It would have erased everything human -- Some say Adam and Eve -- If someone had said, when I was young -- Who needs plaques -- A thousand roads lead to it -- Until I heard Neruda read his poems -- Tang of salt in the walls -- You're invited to visit -- There's only one river -- So many brought here by water -- Love overwhelms us -- From a distance -- Not everyone in the city -- Consider Francois Villon -- Francis's "Canticle of the Creatures" -- Whenever its enemies besiege it -- White flag -- What's the Book after all but -- Sometimes, entering -- Today a letter arrived -- The poems we love -- what are they -- As I say aloud the opening line -- FROM The First Book of Singing, Which Is the Book of Resurrection of the Beloved -- Grief made you heavy -- Not many of them, it's true -- Who'd even dispute -- Who can measure the gratitude -- An anthology gathered -- Book of the beloved's resurrection -- Occult power of the alphabet -- Grief will come to you -- Letting go, when all you want is to hold -- You want -- Where is meaning -- Why should the grave be final? -- Each of us standing at a particular -- Weren't we more than -- Knowing loss always wins -- Human heart -- Flipping pages randomly -- And if not you, then who? -- Black marks -- Who says no lines are written -- The Book: Cosmic jukebox -- No way they can bury -- And that's the gist of it -- There's no mystery -- I never planned to die -- Everything dies. Nothing dies -- Can a poem do that? -- How lucky we are -- The mysteries we live among -- To feel, to feel, to feel -- FROM The First Book of the World, Which Is the Book of Changes -- The world, the world -- always -- Who needs another earth? -- To hold a pane of glass -- It's winter and I think of spring -- It was so easy to love him then -- no How many things -- "Surprise me," the beloved said -- It's time to turn the TV off -- Let's remake the world with words -- How beautiful -- Note to self: remember -- Cat curled asleep -- Waking now, and we didn't even know -- The hero who cuts a swath -- A pen's stronger -- They're empty but swollen, Simone Weil said -- Doesn't the soldier serve -- The terror and thrill -- Invisible distance between -- When, in Valmiki's epic -- Soon enough, the gods will keep their nasty -- Lyric Revises the World -- So obvious that the voice can cease -- Grief today? -- Humid morning -- Hummingbird's furious -- The world comes into the poem -- Weighed down with the weight -- The grapes taste good -- The beloved moves through the world -- Whitman's list of the things he could see -- I know now the beloved -- Where are you standing -- "Eternity" extends its seductive syllables -- Expected in one form -- We poets are always -- Might as well let go -- We know the world's unstable -- "Why not a brief respite?" -- If you believe Shakespeare's -- Yearning for permanence, and who wouldn't? -- FROM The Book of Questions, Which Is Also the Book of Suffering -- Well of course you could think -- Last night, a huge storm -- Traveling, you begin to long -- So many to choose from -- The motions so cautious -- Beloved -- word -- Your Yes against all those -- Sometimes only a groan emerges -- Bitterest of all -- Someone else called out -- Locked in your body -- How is it, by dusk -- Something you never even -- Trying hard just to listen and let -- There are questions -- Hunkered down -- Scar they stare at -- Sometimes we write -- Remember Jacob and the angry angel -- Some of us unlucky -- Those who wake in the middle -- Rain last night -- Could it all be said in a single poem -- Shattered? -- What suffering! Why isn't -- Weeping, weeping, weeping -- To add our own suffering -- FROM The Book of Searching, Which Is the Book of Risk -- All those years -- And isn't the world -- To open the Book -- What was it the beloved -- Ashes and charred sticks -- The lost beloved speaks -- Throwing away hope -- knowing -- From bliss to abyss -- And it happens, of course -- Why not admit terror's -- It's narrow, and no room -- Timorous me -- Not hoping for ghosts -- The beloved is in the Book -- Who'd want to be -- Sometimes, reading the Book -- When we're young there's lots -- Well, it can't be helped -- I ransacked the world -- Comes in all shapes -- Two things poems -- Written in a distant -- Why are we so scared of it -- Relying on a map? -- One thing's for sure -- This room crowded -- Clearing out the room -- Closing my fists -- To Guillaume Apollinaire, the beloved --

THREE FROM The Book of the Body of the Beloved, Which Is Also the Second Book of Singing -- That ancient Egyptian poem -- This is my ode to O -- Most poems -- If a peach leads you into the world -- There's a long-ago scene I like -- Sije t'aime, prends garde a toil -- Some of us, when we're young -- Certain poems, because of their vowels -- Going and coming, but -- Bald, high-domed Taoist sage -- Autumn with its too-muchness -- According to the Big Bopper -- Ordinarily so mild, but suppose -- Some poems offer escape -- Loving those poets most -- Praising all creation, praising the world -- "Audacity of Bliss" -- that's what -- Dancing to her song -- Easy to gaze at stars -- "Astonied, stark in -- Here it is: a room chock-full -- Could be I'm just outside -- It's pretty much a consensus -- Jaw-drop when I first -- Desire in the vowels -- If words had lips -- Often, there's nothing -- Watching as words leap -- Suppose you could evoke -- Not all poems seek -- That song -- why would it be -- Little fish of feeling, small -- Bittersweet, bittersweet -- Flagrante delicto -- Words crowd around -- Longing alone won't make it so -- Asking again and again -- The poem no lifeless wonder -- Staying afloat by -- Poems that unbutton -- FROM The Book of Reading and Writing, Which Is the Book of Poets and Poems -- There on the page -- Space we make -- Reading the poem -- If not for those black scratches -- How could that Chinese poet -- You say you found the poem -- Moving by hints and piths -- The poet might wish -- Way back then when they -- Lead of the heart -- I thought I was hunting -- Suffering, grief, death -- That voice -- How is it those short lines -- Bright scissors -- And all that rage -- Rending it, tearing it -- Don't bother to ask -- As if that poem -- Some phrases move -- Scattered randomly -- Clutching a bottle of wine -- Praxilla's single poem -- Going to the reading -- The poet approaches the lectern -- The beloved is still -- The older I get and the more -- Totally determined -- Time pummels the whole globe -- Even when the words said -- Elegy for Jane Kenyon --

Young, I took it all so -- Words not just the empty -- Sometimes the poem -- To believe so -- The critic Hazlitt, on a visit -- All the different books you read -- Here's how it is -- "The whole country torn -- When I was young I wanted -- It's what you could call -- Wilfred Owen's hunched -- This huge bridge, cabled -- Nothing? Not so much -- Well, of course -- Gerard Manley Hopkins put it succinctly -- As Shakespeare noted: poets -- All those poets for -- A bit of joy, a dollop of longing -- More stores being built -- His song was about the world -- As I get older and nearer -- FROM The Book of My Own Remembering -- Why should it all -- I was born on a small farm -- Childhood swimming hole -- I sat at my kindergarten desk -- When I was just a kid -- Half-dead cherry tree -- On the lawn, beside the red house -- Little card inked with your -- All morning, with gloved hands -- It's Memorial Day. After our march -- I remember him falling beside me -- The field where my brother died -- "He's already in heaven," she said -- If I wrote in a short story -- For me, my brother -- My mother so soon to die -- At the Sunday-school picnic -- From the houses of American engineers -- I pass the old beggar who sits -- It was a tiny, nameless, emerald bird -- My entire youth I hid -- "It happened for me at sixteen" -- If there's a god of amphetamine -- All afternoon they bobbed above us -- On a Highway East of Selma, Alabama -- When I was eighteen and a volunteer -- How small the eyes of hate -- How large the eyes of love -- Young, we waved flags -- Like any other man -- For years I couldn't speak -- When I lived alone in New York, studying -- We'd only just met, were -- Our first, exploratory meeting -- If we were two ships -- From the outset -- I like to think "I" and "you" -- Beloved, with your hair -- Back then I thought flowing -- Yesterday, against admonishment -- It consists of cliffs and plateaus -- Truth of it is: I was born -- My mother's joy -- Meander -- it's the name of a river -- Song of Old Lovers -- All this winter afternoon spent -- FROM The Book of Words, Which Is the Book of Listening and Speaking -- At my age, you don't -- "And the word -- Taking the empty air -- Not fleeing our agony -- Who among us can speak -- Where did the beloved go? -- Vowels woven -- Poets writing words as -- River inside the river -- Saying the word -- Yes, our human -- Dull gray bundle of feathers -- How badly the world needs words -- What did someone cynically -- Words, am I -- Snow on the tree branch -- Each thing in the world -- Nouns doing -- Why try to seize what flows? -- Often just a few notes -- I don't remember -- If I wanted words, I could -- The old philosopher, dying -- If you're unsure what words can do -- What connects us to the world? -- This or that individual story -- "Doggie, doggie!" -- How much love can it hold? -- The world spins -- Outside our bodies, things -- Words, of course, but -- Silence. Does silence -- I put the beloved -- Salt on the roads melts -- When my gaze strays -- All I remember is the chorus -- Balanced on the edge -- Time to shut up -- Some days it's all a blur -- Blossoms scattered in the street -- I always supposed -- Words, how I loved you -- FROM The Second Book of the World, Which Is the Book of Relation -- Knowing life grinds us -- Intimacy not yet -- Who was born so shy -- Fate not just a pair of scissors -- Between -- that's where -- Some of us lucky -- The world so huge and dark -- Hold on! Let go! -- Oh to be deeply naked -- Easy to agree -- It's our bravest deed -- Virgil called them -- Not deepest grief -- All of it's tidal -- Nesting dolls. Inside the body -- Small Ode to the Beloved -- To become the tree, that's easy -- It happens periodically -- A few things you might want to know -- I'm not making this stuff up -- Tears and laughter -- Judging a poem -- When the beloved -- How is it I'm tired -- Has the moon been up there -- Sudden buildup -- The sun a hot hand -- Sun-drenched late- -- Pinch of time I'm -- Not to lead us away -- Watching this inchworm -- Autumn, and the woods -- Skitterbugs on the stream's surface -- Even as we speak -- Not a killing frost, only -- Humble dazzle -- Doesn't the world demand -- To praise what's there -- Autumn and the days -- Let me be the first -- How radiant and pale -- How the crocus pops up -- The dandelion, too -- Here I am, sitting on the porch -- FROM The Second Book of the Book, Which Is the Body of the Beloved Which Is the World -- Long night on the road -- Snow on the mountain -- Naked before the beloved -- Parched and wizened -- Such a shaking. If the elbows -- The poem didn't express -- No one I ever believed said -- Tired of the body? -- There are sorrows -- Who else can do it -- Calm down, calm down -- He's the answer -- Today only a single poem -- The Book said we were mortal; -- You can read the world -- When Sappho wrote -- Cool to the touch -- Memorize those lines you love -- You might think the things I say -- When you're afraid -- A thousand years ago -- Too many mysteries. Too many -- Wildness of the world -- It's not as if I didn't -- Did the beloved die? -- You lost the beloved -- When you're sad -- What or whom does the Book -- If we could have the world -- Making light of the beloved -- How to exhaust the inexhaustible? -- Refute the resurrection -- High Virginia summer -- The river has a single song -- So many singers -- Now the leaves are falling fiercely -- Lingering over it -- Nazim Hikmet begins a poem -- When the beloved appears -- No postmortems, please -- Sorrow and joy -- Listening to Bach's suites -- That single line: a rope -- Song on the jukebox -- Thirsty? -- I confess it -- I've been -- Do words outlast -- Who wants to talk -- Body of the beloved -- Spasm and sadness -- Acrobatic postures I enjoyed -- In the spring swamp -- Lucky poets us -- Being being nothing -- Squander it all! -- A song of resurrection played -- This is what was bequeathed us -- Index of Titles and First Lines.