Book
When our fathers return to us as birds : poems
Publication Information
Detroit : Wayne State University Press, [2021]
Physical Description
ix, 92 pages ; 24 cm.
Summary
"These poems remind us of the importance of both relationships and of place are even more important with that in the background"--
Contents
- What My Father Did Not Have to Say
- Look at Those Birds
- Name of the Father, the Name of the Fish
- Practice
- House With No Light Left On Inside It
- Everything Where I Have Left It
- I Take a Walk With the Gods
- Brothers and Fathers and Sons
- Who Walks in the Rain Walks On water
- Dark Above the River is Light
- South of White Rock, Lake Huron, July 1979
- There is Singing
- Last Song
- What the Birds Keep Trying to Tell Him
- More Birds Than I Know What to Do With
- I Did What I Could to Keep This
- Old Neighborhood
- Because I Could Not Sing
- Song and the river
- My Father's Only Son
- On the Island in Search of My father
- I Did Not Hear the Loons Until Later
- Portrait of My Father At the End as Sisyphus
- Where There is a River There is a Light
- April 6
- On Turning Fifty-Two
- No words
- Too Many Days, or Where the River Turns to Lake
- When It is Dark Enough to See
- Still Life in Winter with River Ice and Sky
- Skin of River and Bone
- Walking Out Alone onto the February River
- We Did Not Know the Difference
- I Am Tempted to Say I Know Nothing
- Winter birds
- We Just Wanted to Get Him Home
- Bird Inside My Fathers chest
- What I Know is Not My Father
- Carrying the Fish
- What Was Never his to Begin With
- When No One Was Looking I looked
- Man on Boat
- What in the Night the Moon makes
- When the Light is Still Present but Fading
- Maybe Next Time
- Sentence I Am Trying Not to Write
- Slow Dance With My Father With No music
- Still Life with Goose in Mid-Flight
- On My Morning Walk I Question What I See
- Fishing in the Rain with My Father
- Under the Hood of My Father's '89 Lincoln Town Car
- On What Would Have Been My Fathers Eighty-Seventh Birthday
- In the Twilight the Something That is Always there
- Where I'm From
- This Water, This Rock and Dirt, This river
- On My Daughter's Twenty-Third Birthday
- What is Always There Even When It isn't
- Where What Was Still Alive Was Singing
- We Looked for the Birds to Tell Us
- When the Loons Return to the River
- Bullhead
- Almost Human
- Sheepshead
- What a Fish is Not Supposed to See
- In a Poem He Might Praise the birds
- What I Still Feel Inside, or Some Other Darkness
- Bones
- When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
- Not Able to say It
- There is Always Some Other Way to Say It
- Swans Revisited
- Moth
- For My mother
- What Did I Know about Work
- Work Song
- Whatever It Was It Was an Honor, Call It a Privilege
- What We Cant Get rid Of
- Guilty
- In Greek the Word for Forgiveness
- Only the River Between Us
- We Fish
- Fear and Death Which is Different Than Fear of Death
- I Am Afraid I Am Going to forget
- On the Other Side of the River
- So Much of What We No Longer Want
- Dead Mans Point
- On the River With Time Being What it Is
- Deadwood
- Wood, Wings, bones
- Tell That to Our Fathers, or On the Eve of My Fifty-Third Birthday, Pointe Mouillee, 2019
- Briefly It Might Have Even flown.