There won't be children,
     let's be honest -
after all,
     you're not coming back.
  
You and I've become
     ninety degree angles
& the months
     go crawling.

I'll mail it all
     to Dublin.
No reason to scream -
     leave it in your cup.

It was a fair shot
     for a while,
but sometimes grass
     just dies in the yard.

Alone in a folding
wing of sun again,
where Scotch passes lips
straight to an idling blood.
If you worried, don't -
I ate another day without you.

A club of sun
down Upshur St
breaks our talk
of pink noise.

Interrupted quilts
of cloud are shyly
unlaced in the stillness
of the afternoon.

I turn your face
toward the green
tunnel of park,
but you're not looking.

Walking down 12th
past old Providence Hospital
where years ago
my second wife

recovered from a seizure
she had while drinking beer
with the Peace Corp neighbors
on the fourth floor

past the Catholic group home
where Shannon lived
in a room that tasted
like old books, before

she showed me how
the energy was working
in the empty moments
that arched between us

past the bridge on Taylor
now covered in anemochory
at the foot of the
high rabbit hill

where Hilary pulled off
a grand seduction like
something from an opera
even the couch was guilty

past the old gym
near the law school
I biked there
at six in the morning

to throw water on sauna rocks,
eating the steam;
I swam away,
never to be seen again.

You came
from verdant Dublin
by word and by mouth.

Ancient sorceries
dealt the evenings
like playing cards.

Paintings stammered
strange truths from the walls
of the marbled gallery:

Yes: you travel with and without.
So walk slowly, dear,
in the cold rain of May.

Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.

I agree to reveal a secret
in a sonnet, Inez, my beautiful enemy;
but no matter how well I set it up,
it cannot be in the first quatrain.

Here, come to the second: I promise you
that the secret won't slip without my telling you;
but I'll be ******, Inez,
if eight lines of this sonnet haven't already gone.

See, Inez, how hard life is!
With the sonnet already in my mouth
and every last detail planned,

I counted each line and have found
that according to the rules by which a sonnet plays,
this sonnet, Inez, is already finished.