For (and “after”) Picasso, from A Book of Luminous Things.

from Depiction of Childhood / by Franz Wright

It is the little girl
guiding the minotaur
with her free hand —

For heat-induced delays and fathers and summers, from Eight American Poets.

from My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow / by Robert Lowell

Nowhere was anywhere after a summer
at my Grandfather’s farm.

For dreams of flying, from Eight American Poets.

from Her Longing / by Theodore Roethke

Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish,
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare’s tail, the floating frogbit

For lost words, lines, dreams, from The Best American Poetry: 1997, edited by James Tate, series editor David Lehman.

from Lines Lost Among Trees / by Billy Collins

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

For the days we face, from The House on Marshland.

from The Undertaking / by Louise Glück

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.

For Persephone, from The House on Marshland.

from Pomegranate / by Louise Glück

First he gave me
his heart. It was
red fruit containing
many seeds, the skin
leathery, unlikely.

For one of my favorite poems of all time, from Return to the City of White Donkeys.

from Of Whom Am I Afraid? / by James Tate

          At some point there was an
old, grizzled farmer standing next to me holding
a rake, and I said to him, ‘Have you ever read
much Emily Dickinson?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I
reckon I’ve read all of her poems at least a
dozen times. She’s a real pistol….’

For the highway that edges our small town, from Highway 99: a literary journey through California’s Great Central Valley.

from The Field / by DeWayne Rail

The field is the last refuge of squirrels,
Jackrabbits, and mice. Deserted, left
To its devices, it has taken years
To grow a thick cover of weeds that tangle

And arch over long tunnels.