DPF / Halpern

For children, from The Best American Poetry 1997, guest editor James Tate, series editor David Lehman.

from Her Body / by Daniel Halpern

the smallest finger poking the air, pointing toward the first heat
    of the single sun, pointing toward the friendly angels
        who sent her, letting them know contact’s made.

DPF / Andrews

For angels, from The Best American
Poetry 1997, guest editor James Tate, series editor David Lehman.

from That Cold Summer / by Nin Andrews

          When the feathers

became more plentiful and blew around the rooms,
I swept them out the door, and they rose and drifted

like earthbound clouds.

DPF / Bowman

For requests of all shapes and sizes, from The Best American Poetry 1997, guest editor James Tate, series editor, David Lehman.

from No Sorry / by Catherine Bowman

Do you have any scissors I could borrow? No, I’m sorry I don’t. What about a knife? You got any knives? A good paring knife would do or a butcher knife or maybe a cleaver? No, sorry all I have is this old bread knife my grandfather used to butter his bread with every morning. Well then, how about

DPF / Brown

For upstate New York, from The Best American Poetry 1997, guest editor James Tate, series editor David Lehman.

from Feminine Intuition / by Stephanie Brown

                     After the picnic
I said, “She reminds me of Little Red Riding Hood.”
My husband said, “Yeah.”
We were doing dishes.
I can’t say some other things, so I say this.

DPF / Fong

For Turlock, from The Best American Poetry 1997, guest editor James Tate, series editor, David Lehman.

from Asylum / by Herman Fong

One afternoon, outside their farmhouse,
we sit on crates and smell yams
swelling in the warm earth.

DPF / Dickey

For Berryman, from The Best American Poetry 1997, editor James Tate, series editor David Lehman.

from The Death of John Berryman / by William Dickey

He loosened his necktie and the recurrent dream
of walking out under water to the destined island.
His mother went over in pearls; his father went over.
His real father went over, whoever his father was.

DPF / Orozco

For ghostly carriages, from The FSG Book of Latin American Poetry, edited by Ilan Stavans.

from Ballad of Forgotten Places / by Olga Orozco (1920-1999, Argentina) translated by Marcy Crow

My places would look like broken mirages,
clippings of photographs torn from an album to orient nostalgia,
but they have roots deeper than this sinking ground,
these fleeing doors, these vanishing walls.

DPF / Zolynas

For dusk in California, from A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

from Zen of Housework / by Al Zolynas

a ceremony of sparrows and bare branches
is setting in Western America.

DPF / Apollinaire

For saltimbanques, from The Poetry of Surrealism, edited by Michael Benedikt.

from Phantom of the Clouds / by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) translated by Michael Benedikt

A tiny spirit without the least human burden
Everybody thought
And this music of shapes and forms
Drowned out that of the mechanical organ
Ground out by the man with his face covered with his own ancestors