The Branch Will Not Break

As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor • Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium • In Fear of Harvests • Three Stanzas From Goethe • Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio • Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota • The Jewel • In the Face of Hatred • Fear Is What Quickens Me • A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Cully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour • Stages on a Journey Westward • How My Fever Left • Miners • In Ohio • Two Poems About President Harding • Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959 • In Memory of a Spanish Poet • The Undermining of the Defense Economy • Twilights • Two Hangovers • Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me • Two Horses Playing in the Orchard • By a Lake in Minnesota • Beginning • From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower • March • Trying to Pray • Two Spring Charms • Spring Images • Arriving in the Country Again • In the Cold House • Snowstorm in the Midwest • Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960 • American Wedding • A Prayer to Escape From the Market Place • Rain • Today I Was Happy, So I Made this Poem • Mary Bly • To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota • I Was Afraid of Dying • A Blessing • Milkweed • A Dream of Burial