I cast a spell in the afternoon:
a wand flicks and a cat vanishes

only to reappear chewing on a feather
with a small plastic baseball attached,

both strung on elastic cord that runs
to the black stick in my hand.

She gnaws the baseball bird,
conqueror, dominant victor

in her bedspread domain.
The other cat sullenly spies

with side eye, eager to join
but loathe to wrestle the calico.

With another spell, the feather is freed
to flight across couch, across chair,

bouncing with fat temptation
until it returns to the patchwork lair

of the huntress, who snakes a paw
to stop all renegade motions.

These are the death throes
of the baseball bird, whose final arc

ends in fang and claw on a quilt square
that purrs darkly with city sunset.

Beneath the arch,
        among the branches,
      the maunder of her eyes
           finds noir in an afterimage,
every reflection is unique,
    explicit and indivisible,
        every reflection is her,
      there she looks close
       for gracefulness,
            in the essays of her skin
               and their brazen transparencies,
         she enters into her body fable,
      the shape of her resembles
           the tenor viol: where it widens,
                  where it narrows,
                where it digresses
              and monochromes,
           she reflects a fragile geography,
             a soft cargo, but
               an inkling of hurricane,
             rendering the fault lines
          beautiful and strong,
       in supplication tomorrow's explorer
will disturb the patterns
   until she's become her own lullaby

T-----,

My guitar chattered in my hand
at the elm and oak wall of spring

as you beat drums with a covert heart,
strutting tattoos that died in ****.

But you didn't show on Saturday,
or the one after either,

leaving us drumless in the pool hall,
having to call Jimmy quick -

at sixteen we were quick to forgive.
You went into the Army

but left under a strange cloud
after an incident in the mountains.

After that at the odd house party
I watched the goodness leave you,

a lake sweltered away to motes.
After you fought Rory on the planks

of night you were unwelcome,
you vanished into mummy's threads,

hillish murmurs and silhouettes,
just an occasional twenty-year thought

I have when winter's stretch succumbs
to green oak glitters, vivid loaves of elm.

Even so, I send you my best.
-Evan

First you get a swimming pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
Pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
-Kendrick Lamar, "Swimming Pools"

O milky cataracted eye of moon -
your brow a brittle wet-black shadow
of grave silence and starry freckle -

your gibbous gaze is cast at me,
but what do you see?
A poet who refuses to grow up,

who drinks scotch like wine,
& wine like water. Whose heart
stains his sleeve, who listens

to gin glories and sin stories,
slurring insurrections from the red
nest in the middle branches of me.

At 17 I dated a librarian who I loved
& thought I would marry.
God, how I loved her...

but it failed on a windy night
in a dorm littered with beer cans
& her pale blue infidelities.

Then at 23 I married, things slid
& slid and slid, the nights blurry
& dead; then there was nothing left.

At 28, the girl who was so angry
we were banned from seven bars
after she broke glass at my face,

crying and screaming and kissing me.
At 29 I dated the blonde *******,
who wanted a master and not a lover,

impatiently splayed across the bed,
waiting for someone I wasn't,
waiting for the perfect sober iron lash.

I dated and married, then did it again,
my moon always in Pisces,
my soul here and there,

a mechanism more than a man,
depression echoing like a bell
from Dublin to DC and back.

My father died of drink,
& sometimes when I'm in my cups
I contemplate my own destinies.

This family drinks its anesthesia,
accepts a ghosting numbness
& pretended ignorance. Don't look -

the prodigal son has fallen
on the threshold, and the moon
has no arms to lift him up again.