The cloud pulls apart,
a two-headed ripple
in a towering sepulcher
blue as a peacock.
I am a witness,
possibly the only one,
to this bright death.
This, then, is the memorial
of something that lived
as a waver in the upmost field
for just a few minutes,
slain by the unfaithful breeze.

Rude, infant cloud,
stamping east -
will you carry
something for me?
Bleachy lump, shroud,
linen's careless crease
in bloodless aerie,
trawl a lyric to quay.
White-headed, bowed
beneath high fleece,
insolent taffy, ferry
over salt-rutted sea:
Take them, these words -
before I ask the birds.

I walk in wild
liquor combs
of stag grass,
alleys of fat cubes,
all engraved with
a Cinderella moon
that bows out at midnight.
Under it all,
a grease of solitude:
it's just me, and
these things.
I watch one neighbor
collecting delivery
in the upper dusk.
Another falls
to mattress, in
a lonely window
all of yellow.
Lamps fluoresce,
streaming cruelly,
while cigarettes
float in the dark.
Where are you,
in this?
Thousands of miles
in the rain.

last night her sleep was measured on steel,
****** down without a drop wasted.

we were spoons ‘til her limbs stilled -
tears spilled, found their way to my pillow.

I don’t know why I cry - if tears did help
she’d feel better by now.

The clouds are entrails
full of meals of sun.
There has been a petite
****** between us,
but I've forgiven it -
the heart is water.
That could be a lie;
the scalpel's slit is finer
as I sit here,
the ideal patient,
staring at a street
scrubbed with wind.
Please, never read this.

An incomplete face
in its glass slab,
pulls a distance over me.
Mournful, I watch the neighbors
streaming down the toothy walk
in black and brown coats,
their laundry massed  
on shoulder tilt,
or in little onion cart.
They are all right here,
in this winter identity.
Washington accepts them.
If they should crane
& launch a coup d'œil
into this hunched pane
they'll know I am not of them;  
what body I have
stalls on this laminate -
the black fume
behind fastened eye
has already bolted
to keels of poetry
across furrowed Atlantic:
completing a glass face.

O tunnel of firs,
tied with rain,
were you watching too,
when my parapet
ate a hock of indigo
at seven, and, still hungry,
gobbled a dull star?
Were you watching
from cold roots,
little grove, when
something unfaithful
happened? A curling lip
received a sacrament
of apple cider vinegar
under clouds of hospital gauze.
O firs, you never tell me anything,
too proud by half in your
gowns of needles.  
That's alright - I'll lay until
the night slips over the line,
and imagine a kind of morning
where I have nothing to tell you either.