Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved. Gregory Orr

      

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      Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

      This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

       For Trisha, Eliza, and Sophia Beloveds All

      Contents

        Title Page

        Note to Reader

       Part One

      1  The beloved is dead

      2  Who wants to lose the world

      3  When I open the Book

      4  It’s not magic; it isn’t a trick

      5  Sadness is there, too

      6  Isis kneels on the banks

      7  The poem is written on the body

      8  “What is life?”

      9  The things that die

      10  I read the Book for years

      11  I’ve known grief

      12  I want to go back

      13  How easy to give up hope

      14  There’s nothing occult going on

      15  Can a river flow beside itself ?

      16  When Sappho wrote

      17  How radiant and pale

      18  Salt on the roads melts

      19  The river has a single song

      20  The world comes into the poem

      21  Smart or dumb? Who cares?

      22  Those who wake

      23  If death, then grief, right?

      24  Suppose you could evoke

      25  Those dreams in which a phantom

      26  Everything dies. Nothing dies.

      27  Silence

      28  The beloved has gone away

      29  Some of the poems are clear

      30  Tears and laughter

      31  Reading and writing poems

      32  Lighten up, lighten up

      33  Too many mysteries

       Part Two

      1  To feel, to feel, to feel

      2  Sometimes happy, sometimes sad

      3  Or is it loss ahead

      4  Concentrating on those motions

      5  To lose the loved one

      6  Even the saddest poems have journeyed

      7  Nothing more beautiful than the body

      8  Someone else called out

      9  Why should the grave be final?

      10  Listening to Bach’s solo suites

      11  Now the snow is falling

      12  It’s winter and I think of spring

      13  I never planned to die

      14  When my kids look for me I hope

      15  How small the eyes of hate

      16  How large the eyes of love

      17  Scratched with a stick in snow

      18  To become the tree

      19  Could it all be said in a single poem

      20  Who can measure the gratitude

      21  When we’re young there’s lots

      22  To add our own suffering

      23  To hold a pane of glass

      24  Nesting dolls

      25  Of course, a book about living

      26  When you are sad

      27  To be alive

      28  Calm down, calm down

      29  So obvious that the voice can cease

      30  Facing away from the light

      31  Weeping, weeping, weeping

      32  The human heart

      33  To loll in a sensual torpor

      34  I saw my own body

      35  How to exhaust the inexhaustible?

      36  Time to shut up

      37  We’d only just met

      38  Snow on the tree branch

      39  Tired of the body?

      40  You