The bat -- To swim -- Two owls -- Race track, Hialeah, FL -- Skin -- Copper -- Consolation -- Girl, 9, secretly snips a lock of another student's hair -- Girl with pigeons -- Girl in the backseat, Wisconsin winter -- Entering the bath -- Stratus clouds form -- Mackerel sky -- Lost things -- Translation -- Butterflies at Santa Cruz -- No letters -- Mission District, San Francisco -- His letter -- Sassafras -- The gift -- December underneath -- Foxgloves -- The selkie wife -- The missing women -- The selkie from shore -- Wild blackberries -- Robe -- Fair isle -- Secondhand dress -- Window and field -- The sleeping gypsy -- Claim -- Keeper -- Cave painting, Font-de-Gaume -- Deep north -- Bottle gentian -- A kind of vanishing -- A field guide to North American wildflowers -- Bluebird house -- Rufous-sided towhee -- The door -- A fragment of Sappho -- Secondhand sweater -- The selkie returns from the sea -- Cusp -- Wood -- It moves -- The fire road -- The underpainting.
Summary
The poems in this book explore, and long for, intimacy: with nature, with others, with the unknown. They delve into purely dark spaces (the insides of birdhouses and mailboxes, caves of prehistoric paintings) and in-between places, searching out, as Paul Eluard put it, the other world inside this one, pointing to the pervasive sensuality that connects all beings, and to the fact that essential goodness and sorrow often walk hand in hand.
