The poems in this collection travel across lifetimes, each twist and turn of the outer world reflecting an inner landscape, narratives unfolding against ever-changing backdrops-- places, seasons, decades. They trace the complexities of an ordinary life through the histories and environments that gave them shape--shifting from homes and tree-lined neighborhoods, to a rain-soaked cemetery, an opera house in Hanoi, a beach in Ceylon, a village in Poland. In them are the contradictions and surprises, moods and modulations of individual experience, evoking both the transitory nature of our world and the timelessness of the human condition.