Opening with a substantial section of new work and bringing together poems from four previous collections, So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems displays the arc of the poet's imaginative unfolding. The new pieces include a woman's disquisition on marriage while she chops beets, a letter to a birth-mother in China, a pantoum quilted from Agnes Martin's writings and a sly glimpse of the affair between spirit and matter. Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars the poems collected here balance intimacy and objectivity in exact, lyric language.



Out of the west, unexpected, lyric,
a stand of yellow irises
rises from the pond muck.

Two horses graze the field,
one limping from the fire they fled.

Matter and spirit meet, love,
argue, wherever you rest your eyes,
on microscopic midges, horseflies.



Here, on the western edge of the time zone,
I sleep in, but it's dark when I get up.
On the other side of the divide, you rise
at the same moment: though it's early, light
already pastels and recontours the sky.
Ahead of me, the day, a nickle buffalo,
flared nostrils and scuffed up dust clouds
through which I dimly see you gather Sarah
and start the car, the cold engine steaming
my drained cup. A pen lies on the desk,
a tool in a dentist's tray, its gleam patent,
prying. Open your mouth, it wheedles, open
wide. Twisting away, I glimpse two chairs
askew, crushed napkins, your untouched tea.



Unmoored, drifting,
I read the urgency I see
in his face as epinephrine-

injected love. I like that
look, and while the moon
wavers, presiding over

my corpus, negotiating
the shrouded terms
of my release, I want

to feel his gravitational,
double-knotted, binding
pull, wrist and waist.