from The Next Room of the Dream (1962)
To Clio, Muse of History
Santa Claus
To the Mannequins
The Iron Characters
Don Juan to the Statue
One Forever Alien
A Spell before Winter
Human Things
Idea
Somewhere
De Anima
Blue Suburban
These Words Also
Vermeer
The End of Summer School
To David, about His Education
Gnomes
Debate with the Rabbi
On the Threshold of His Greatness, the Poet Comes Down with a Sore Throat
Lion & Honeycomb

from The Blue Swallows (1967)
Landscape with Figures
A Life
The Human Condition
The Companions
Sarajevo
To a Scholar in the Stacks
Sunday
At the Airport
To the Governor & Legislature of Massachusetts
A Full Professor
A Relation of Art and Life
A Modern Poet
The Dream of Flying Comes of Age
The Rope's End
Projection
In the Black Museum
The Blue Swallows
Summer's Elegy
Two Girls
The Mud Turtle
For Robert Frost, in the Autumn, in Vermont

from Gnomes and Occasions (1973)
Quaerendo Invenietis
Solipsism & Solecism
Extract from Memoirs
Lines & Circularities
Brueghel: The Triumph of Time
Zander on God
On Getting Out of Vietnam
Thirtieth Anniversary Report of the Class of '41
Of Experience
Epitaph
The Tapestry
September, the First Day of School
On Being Asked for a Peace Poem
The World as Brueghel Imagined It
To D---, Dead by Her Own Hand
The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House
Myth & Ritual
The Rent in the Screen
Snowflakes
Analogue
Knowledge

from The Western Approaches (1975)
Fugue
Strange Metamorphosis of Poets
Ozymandias II
Einstein & Freud & Jack
Waiting Rooms
Critic
Novelists
The Common Wisdom
The Western Approaches
Boy with Book of Knowledge
Pockets
The Dependencies
Figures of Thought
Walking Down Westgate in the Fall
The Consent
A Common Saw
First Snow
Conversing with Paradise
The Thought of Trees
Drawing Lessons
An Ending

from Sentences (1980)
Literature
Adoration
On the Soul
Manners
Writing the Realistic Short Story
Coming Home to New York When It Was Said To Be Going Down the Drain
The Three Towns
Acorn, Yom Kippur
First Things, and Last
Morning Glory
During a Solar Eclipse
The Dying Garden
A Christmas Storm
Ceremony
Walking the Dog
The Little Aircraft
The Makers
By Al Lebowitz's Pool
The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80
Elegy
Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

from Inside the Onion (1984)
On His Own Terms
Reading Pornography in Old Age
In Memory of the Master Poet Robert Browning
Imprecated upon a Postal Clerk
Arthur
At the Tomb of the Unknown Celebrity
Reverie of the Termite Queen
Calendars
Poetics
Gnomic Variations for Kenneth Burke
This Present Past
A Blind Man at the Museum
Graven Images
Lucretian Shadows
Fish Swimming amid Falling Flowers
Adam and Eve in Later Life
Inside the Onion
She
For -----, to Protect Her from Burns
First Light

from War Stories (1987)
To Joy Our Student, Bidding Adieu
Authorities
On an Occasion of National Mourning
The Shopping Mall, the Moral Law
The Bluejay and the Mockingbird
Drowning the Book
Models
Low-Level Cross-Country
Night Operations, Coastal Command RAF
The War in the Air
World Lines
D-Day + All the Years
Remembering the Way
The Shadow Side
The Afterlife
In the Beginning
More Joy in Heaven
Two-Person / Zero Sum
Theater of the Absurd
The Celestial Emperor
Landscape with Self-Portrait

Trying Conclusions (1987-91)
Long Distance
Magnitudes
To the Congress of the United States, Entering Its Third Century
Witnessing the Launch of the Shuttle Atlantis
The Process
Media
Answering Back
Soundings
Romantics
Realists
Minims (1-6)
The Revised Version
Analogies
1776
Larkin
The Forbidden City
The Evergreen
Waste
A Keepsake for the Kids
August
Kicking Off the Combined Federal Campaign, October 11, 1988
The Amateurs of Heaven
The End of the Opera
Trying Conclusions

Acknowledgments