O little cloud,
where have you gone?
You sink to wisp or worse.
Your grayness turns bone-white,
then a cancerous blue
until you are nothing -
no, you are nothing now.
Your grave is the air
that I breathe.

I sharply decline with you;
you, up in your vault,
waiting for the densities
that will crease you into rain,
I in my mug-clutter,
my liquor-ploughed
library of ills,
try to cope,
come to grips.

Little cloud,
you died a long time ago.
You were reborn,
& died again. You've died
so many wet deaths.
I understand.
This is no world
to live in more
than a day or two.

It is six fifteen in the morning
when you call me,
worried that I'm not well.

I hold you in a little tired slice
of choke-glass blooming
in an smear-eyed hand -

I face you with all my blotches,
try to splint the break,
to be where you are.  

Maybe you're right -  
your love undoes me.
The hours are pauses, aches,

each more or less intolerable.
If my heart slumps away
one of these smoked spring nights,

an unbeating gore-stump,
carry me back to Dublin
& spread my ash-seed

in Iveagh Gardens,
where I carelessly left a dream
among the cane apple husks.

Drink whisky
& recite one of the hundreds
of poems I sent you

to the water-ruined statue
near the rose cage;
maybe someday you'll be curious,

and find the ones I never sent,
filled with sorrow's rennet,
sour-salted, reeking of rain,

retch-cairns
to the halved honeycomb-husk
it seemed like we were becoming.

So of course I both live and die
when your ****** chime
breaks my false, papery day:

I love you above all things,
even now, when you turn half away -  
I don't think you will turn back -

but are you really done here?
Are the white lilies really dead
in the bleachy vase?

This is not what I wanted -
the black wing, a door closing -  
I am living the wrong life.

Tattered edge.

Hacked leylandii flicker
needle-teeth and sequins.

When foxes cry
I dream - my rag doll baby.

When foxes cry, I hold her tight -
pinch together seams.

Try to feed her. Bleed instead. Flood
her small, sharp mouth with red -

then watch the blood soak in.

When foxes cry, she screams.

When foxes cry
I dream - my rag doll baby.

Dear J----,

How many suns died,
out in the black margins
& burning headrooms
since we last shared
any words of importance?
I look out tonight from the roof
towards the endless upper branch
& swear a few have blinked away.

You strolled in so casually
from my dream, as if from the wood
or park, and common strokes
moved in the air between us.
Your words fork across
all your grassy miles,
as you tell me about the fox-scream;
I can almost see the starlings
hash across miniature cubes of lawn.

I live in silver -
the cars that flicker right to left,
the metro's metallic hide,
the strange inflorescent cloud
that garottes the coinish moon.
I'll lend it you on afternoons
when the rain deposits itself
in quiet blue discs across the city.

Go now, and know
that I am always grateful
for another friend, especially
when they understand
how hard a heart heaves
across all the bent years.

Yours,
Evan

A gaunt green so full of song:
a lark bunting nests in the holly,

under a marmalade chariot
with Catherine-wheels:

I mean both senses of the word.
Self-lashes leave stripes thin as days.

O, how I move my hands for you,
from pen to wrack, choking away

the sobs, sometimes, because
your city is far from this city;

but other times I run my thumb
across your kitchen scrawl,

across your glassed-in face,
across the things you touched

when the dream was living.
The gaunt blue princess

holly quavers beyond
the trellised net, thronged

with twig now: a little bird
caches its frail life away

from a cat o' nine tails sun
that is whipping & whipping.

It's another late night
when rain strokes the yard

into gore-blue slate strakes.
Beyond the almond-thin window

a car hurtles into a red away
at the same time

as your face pushes
through the plum-colored

angelfish orchids
right to my blanket eye

as I wake from a dream
about snow in Dublin.

A moon bathes in Judas rain,
in dense yellow shadow;

although I am so alone -
I have never been so alone -

I feel your presence
in this strange convergence

of a flower's face, and
the memory of motherless snow.