SO THERE'S THIS DRUNK (1995). For Gordon Fitch, whose off-hand allusion to the eponymous joke sparked the poem.

LITTLE PRAYER (1984).

LITTLE PRAYER FOR ST. VALENTINE'S DAY (1993).

AUBADE (1980). Not originally conceived as a "little prayer"; a slightly different text was published in Clark Now (Clark University), 1988.

WIND PRAYER (1995).

SNOW PRAYER (1995).

LITTLE PRAYER IN NOVEMBER (1996).

LITTLE PRAYER IN LATE FEBRUARY (1997).

BIG BANG (1997).

ACCOMMODATION (1996). I now have very good bifocals.

SECOND PERSON SINGULAR (2003).

A DRY-STONE DIKE (1995). Many unmortared walls (dry-stone dikes) in the fields and second-growth woods of southern New England are "consumption walls", built where they are because it was easier to pile up the stones left by the glaciers than to haul them off. This poem is in memory of Howard Arthur Faye, who I only ever knew via e-mail and Usenet, and Jane Kenyon, who I'd known for several years in 1979 when she and I launched her first book of poetry and my second at a reading at the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street in Boston one snowy evening.