Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.

Errant firework in the distance,
folding sun in a west bed.
The evening is dying, canceling
away in the purple shade.
I walk south, west, west,
until I'm on the mirrored water,
a new Narcissus in the valley,
among the rusted thighs of the city.

Everything is a memory of her;
the cocktails, the coffee, the sherry,
the faint scent of rosewater,
the long theater grass.
But now it's cleared away
by ice cream men and sirens
as far as the river steps,
the descent into the sunken palace.

An orange layer blankets the evening flow,
& the haunted asphalt is a black spine
of humid trees. She is gone,
but her outline remains everywhere.
Tonight I'll wander to the whisky bar
& buy forgetfulness.
A distant sky presses in;
this place is far from everything.

I was a knotted shadow,
walking under a bridge
in Dublin, brick water vault
under the grand canal line,
on my way to the coffee shop.

Now I'm a sun-ray, lost to scatter
on the bolt-broad walk,
lost in a carpet cloud,
lost, lost. I'm in another place,
where the wind off the river
tassles the tops of slate roofs
on its way to my corner windows,
a mocking push that carries no salt.

I am sure I will not see it again.
I will go out instead, forward,
out into the alleys and greeneries
& grassworks and cementings,
to find something new
that might replace a wet shadow
full of coffee by the sea.

Well, here I am, without her -
in this new dark space
where I'm slowly breathing.
I pour another drink in the dark -

a few tremulous stars
encrust the subfusc city mantle,
& a bus growls off
down a flat hallway of road.

The floor is paved with books -
the cat sleeps under a half-moon
that's curled like a rotted aloe leaf.
How are things in Dublin, I wonder?

The night pools in the air,
above the sighing branch.
The kitchen is smaller here.
Grief leaks into the tight hours.

I see a bathroom light snap on
across the street. Birds clap across
the row. A car races down the rack,
& one more minute stutters away.

The air is cotton-tangle thick and
thoughts are heavy.

I unpick a hem of memory -

The quiet pip-pip of a broken stitch
gives way to raw.

The mulberry tree is night-ripe,
its fruit fermenting almost before dripping
down the branch to the gray-saddled sidewalk,
where birds refuse it; the sharpened tang
slips and spreads into the green closeness.
Char-wings spread out above me,
interrupted by static bursts of cloud
that stream from a southern vagueness;
the waxed crescent moon-blossom
spits a little of its milkish shine
towards me in the black heat.
The lance-lights of the streetlamps
snap on, lidless and yellowed,
venting that yellow down
into the wet cut yards.
Everything is quiet, empty;
in a cardboard box by my side
is her sketchbook, our locket,
her old phone. I look through the glass
at the blue cape that drapes
the sandy castle across the street,
watching as sleep comes for me,
mincing through hillside pines.