little birds swerve
into green chandeliers
in the park hexagram
with a seethe and a sigh -

hungry angels fill the air,
the sun gripes with marthambles,
melancholy fills a larynx
& light-shells spree across the walk.

I spent six hours at the bar,
wet talk and high song,
but the bier-bed at night's end
beckoned with red vacancy.

The aloe flowers are dying, drying
to flat little coral-colored bell-shapes;
hungry angels and little birds
peck at the windows just before noon.

lythrum leans in
curious, tall -
I have nothing to tell

nothing left

I take careful steps, mind loose-stones
don’t twist me up

fire-lidded

I am here, I breathe here

I bleed a weak, thorny tide

here

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.