I made the perishing ride
to the hospital house,
sprays of sumac palling
the spring frame yard -
There were strangers at the table.

I stood my glass,
listened to the black-bagged speech
where the savage girl lobbed
against the terrible slack.
They carried him out.

You were a smeary bruise,
your eye hysterical,
cut from white twill
in the brumal March;
I slipped my blues,
to a blonde chorale
in your room, on the hill
gushing with larch.
We practiced slow,
while black cones bled
coffee. Your breath
came in little throws,
your heart in parcels of red,
that led to our little death.

Mickey and I rounded the house
to an orange pool wrestling
with an aluminum gloam,
deck chairs and log quarters
stacked in the yard spread
against the high house,
Maryland night bent through
the gate rings, and whiskey
seeds come toll.
After twenty beers,
I fell on my side,
retreated enough to throw up
alone, sedate rectangles
over speeding asphalt.
Dazed, I wandered inside
& found the girl
in the water heater room,
pink bra under bare bulb,
feasting on the joists.  
Mickey drove me back.
My sister was on the phone, laughing,
while I sat in the stitch of my room
waiting for an axe handle lullaby.

I was a winter's seventeen
as I stared out the window
of an old 91 Pontiac
at two in the morning
& saw the golden grass
churning the leaking dark
of the middle school meadow.
The moon died, was reborn
to a scaffold's womb.
We stayed up, but didn't speak.
Not even when we saw
amber hands gripping the field brow,
arranging the morning.
She started the car in the strip lot
& stole me home.

Memories hang
like windchimes in me,
knock darkly to each other -
I carry them with me,
ingots of loss,
stacked steams of grief.
All these memories,
clicking like x-rays -
I take you and gently
add you to them.

talons haze
for crisp frost roots
on bells of shores