David Wagoner is the author of eighteen collections of poems, including The House of Song, Good Morning and Good Night, and Traveling Light, as well as ten novels. He has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Winner of the 2009 Washington State Book Award in Poetry.— Washington State Book Award in Poetry

• Contents 1 My Mother's Poem The First Movie The Other House My Snake Fan Dance Whistler's Mother The Red Hat The First Touch 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 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 5 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 (Contents-3) 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 6 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