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straps, incongruously green;
        and then that snap—
    like Allah’s blessings falling through
    fingers that wished to keep you.

Acknowledgments
    Thanks to the editors of the following magazines, where poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form: “The Reader” and “After September” in
The American Scholar;
“Discovery” in
The Atlanta Review;
“A Morris Dance” in
The Atlantic Monthly;
“Advent” in
Harvard Divinity Bulletin;
“Trompe l’Oeil” in
The Kenyon Review;
“Hare” and “In the Guesthouse” in
The New Criterion;
“Midsummer, Georgia Avenue” in
The New Republic;
“Deliveries Only” and “Peonies” in
The New Yorker;
“Glasses” and “Florida Fauna” in
Profile, Full Face;
“Shadow” in
The Southwest Review;
“The Accordionist” and “For Emily at Fifteen” in
Stand;
“TWA 800” in
Upstairs at Duroc;
“The Newspaper Room” and “Another Session” in
The Yale Review;
“Office Hours” and “The Big Sleep” in
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
“On the Wing” was first published in the anthology
Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English.
    I am grateful to the MacDowell Colony and to the Bogliasco Foundation for residencies that enabled me to complete this book. Madeleine Blais, Daniel Hall, Ann Hulbert, Brad Leithauser, Peggy O’Brien, Cynthia Zarin, and my editor, Ann Close, gave much-appreciated help.
    “Peonies” is dedicated to Ellen Berek; “The Newspaper Room” to Isaac Cates; “Discovery” to the memory of Amy Clampitt; “After September” to Anne Fadiman and George Colt; “TWA 800” to Claire and David Fox; “A Morris Dance” to the memory of Harold Korn; “Shadow” to the Kundl family; “Trompe l’Oeil” to Mark and Bryan Leithauser; “Crystal Ball” to the Lyon family; “Office Hours” to Amanda Maciel and Diane Rainson; “Midsummer, Georgia Avenue” to Wyatt Prunty; “Erasers” to Albert Salter; “The Reader” to Marty Townsend.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in Detroit and Baltimore. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and worked as a staff editor at
The Atlantic Monthly
and as Poetry Editor of
The New Republic.
Her awards include fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she is also a co-editor of
The Norton Anthology of Poetry.
In addition to her five poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book,
The Moon Comes Home.
She is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and lives with her family in Amherst, Massachusetts.

ALSO BY MARY JO SALTER
    Poems
    A Kiss in Space
   (1999)
    Sunday Skaters
   (1994)
    Unfinished Painting
   (1989)
    Henry Purcell in Japan
   (1985)
    For Children
    The Moon Comes Home
   (1989)