The person we love
Is the shadow
Of our face
In the future

translated by Talat S. Halman

To love
Is
To double
The world

translated by Talat S. Halman

Moses’s feelings were strenuous but not sad and he did not remember the skimming fleet at the ten-minute signal before a race or the ruined orchards where he hunted grouse or Parson’s Pond and the cannon on the green and the water of the river shining between the hardware store and the five-and-ten-cent store where Cousin Justina had once played the piano. We are all inured, by now, to those poetic catalogues where the orchid and the overshoe appear cheek by jowl; where the filthy smell of old plumage mingles with the smell of the sea. We have all parted from simple places by train or boat at season’s end with generations of yellow leaves spilling on the north wind as we spill our seed and the dogs and the children in the back of the car, but it is not a fact that at the moment of separation a…