Contents
Part I
The Rain
The Polka-Dot Shirt
The Japanese Rooms
How to Sit in a Café
Prescription for Insomniacs
What Hemingway Learned from Cézanne
The Institute of Cool
A Nazi in Retirement
The Blue Period
Lifesaving
Part II
Coronado Rises in the Stirrups
All Seas Belong to Neruda
Hitler’s Barber
Ferlinghetti’s Ears
Custer
Three Kings
With Fitzgerald along the Côte d’Azur
Mornings with Freud
The Psychic Geography of Atlantis
III
Household Buddhas
A Saint for You
The Shape of the Human Soul
Infant
Teaching a Child the Art of Confession
The Machinery of the Soul
Martyr
The Wasted Day
On Finding a Landscape I Painted as a Child
The Buddha of Arithmetic
IV
Country Music
Passing Through a Small Town
Tornado
The American Dream
Bomb Shelter
Shooting the Horse
Tabloid Headlines
Critic
A Thousand Miles from Nowhere
Reading to the Blind Man
May I Interest You?
Accordion Lessons
The Id
Testicles
V
Afternoon Nap
Visitation
Graveyard
The Ambassador of the Dead
The Art of Forgetting
Poems That Can Only Be Written at Night
The Slaves of My Ancestors
Armor
The Funeral of the Moon
Warehouse
Old Age
Mushrooms
High Water Mark
The Immortal
Acknowledgments