beginning with a line by Tomaž Šalamun

Too much peace, someone told us,

can break a man apart

yet we could not stop moving in front

of that phrase or what it might have meant

had we not been the ones who heard it first,

sandhi rippling with every stroke of light

into the morning: sometimes we’d turn

our clocks ahead in autumn

or unwind them an hour in spring

as a mother might arrive at a house to find

the door has already been opened,

whoever was inside gone out.

There is little give and take

walking backward into winter:

half-parsed wind through sumac and birch

has never been seen in this town

where a letter from across the street

is an answer, and sometimes isn’t

for those who live and die by what

the mailbox brings, and doesn’t.

From By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the author.