front cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Acknowledgments -- Table of Contents -- 1 -- My Mother's Poem -- The First Movie -- The Other House -- My Snake -- The Fan Dance -- Whistler's Mother -- The Red Hat -- The First Tough -- Elegy for a Safety Man -- How Johnny Nolan Rescued Me -- Passing the Road Gang -- Curtsy -- Talk -- Crane Fly -- Homework in Social Studies -- Castle -- My Father's Dance -- 2 -- The Invitation -- What Do I Know? -- A Lesson from a Student -- An Assignment for Student Playwrights -- In the Green Room -- The Heaven of Actors -- A Visitor Calls on Joseph Conrad -- Catfish -- Mr. Bones -- On Being Asked by an Assistant to the Governor of the State of Washington for an Appropriate Quotation from a Native American to Conclude an Inaugural Speech -- An Assignment for Senior Citizens -- Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love -- The Moth -- 3 -- In Youngs Creek -- Stopping along the Way -- Blind Instinct -- That Bird -- Meadowlark -- A Pastoral Elegy for a Pasture -- Watching a Boa Constrictor Yawn -- The Escaped Gorilla -- Judging a Hog -- Thoreau and the Mud Turtle -- The Elephant's Graveyard -- Falling Behind -- The Hunters -- For the Man Who Taught Tricks to Owls -- On a Glass of Ale under a Reading Lamp -- 4 -- Owning a Creek -- Up against the Sea -- The Right Way -- On an Island -- Rescue -- Upstream -- Letting the Grass Grow under Your Feet -- Cemetery Grass -- The Heart of the Forest -- 5 -- Free Fall -- The Presumption of Death -- For an Old Woman at the Gate -- Being Taken for a Ride -- The Driver -- The Follower -- At the Scene of Another Crime -- Stakeout -- Changing Rooms -- In the Dark Room -- 6 -- What the Houses Were Like Then -- Man Overboard -- Moving through Smoke -- Unarmed Combat -- Attention -- At Ease -- Under Fire -- Night Reconnaissance -- The Stand-up Cell.

What the Stones Say -- On First Looking through the Wrong End of a Telescope -- The Center of Gravity -- An Old Man Sitting Down -- An Old Man Stacking Firewood -- The Old Men -- The Hero -- 7 -- The Eve of the Festival of Venus -- 8 -- Between Neighbors -- On Deck -- Fighting the Blizzard -- What Billy Graham Said to Me at the Fair -- In the Emergency Room -- Weeds -- An Informal Elegy for Neckties -- Looking Respectable -- Doing Six Impossible Things before Breakfast -- What to Do All Day -- Thoreau and the Quagmire -- At the Deep End of the Public Pool -- In the Graveyard of Major Appliances -- The Solution to Yesterday's Puzzle -- Knots -- Cell Division -- A Snap Quiz in Body Language -- For a Man Who Wrote Cunt on a Motel Bathroom Mirror -- Night Song from the Apartment Below -- Desire -- The Spider's Eye -- The Day I Believed in God -- A Congo Funeral -- back cover.