"Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
-Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

Under the involucres of yard hazel
I stopped your water when I was ten -

bent over the hidden pump stock,
I unscrewed the round rusty skullcap,

& felt the living nests of wire in my fingers.
Your father was patiently furious

in the fresh dooryard of the old farmhouse
where we played the Winnie the Pooh game.

Twenty years later we briefly crossed paths,
but my then-wife hated you -

you were pretty, clever, lustrous,
your hands full of sly flat smiles.

You threw me Belle and Sebastian -
you'll never know they are my favorite,

because you slid onward to Vanderbilt,
god only knows where you are now.

You escaped into a life,
I flattened under one.

Your imagination stuck me like arrows.
Your voice was glossy with cat-dreams.

You are a comet - you visit twice
in a lifetime, and always leave me astonished.

"We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—"
-Shelley


Dad would have been eighty today;
instead, years have gone by since I ran
the two and a half miles to the hospital
under a burnt, charry October wing

to visit him in his mechanical bed.
He was caving into himself, the doctors
blamed the liver, everyone was scared.
The halls were stocked with floating eyes.

Today the heat gripped the chopped hems
of street and ate away at our feet.
The dish of sky grew gray as mold,
striped with varices of rain that did not break.

Everything waits: Wednesday waits
for Thursday's lip, the moon waits
for the thunderbolt tongue, I am waiting -
for almost anything, anything to happen to me.

“Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea”
-Gregory Corso

A hundred thousand red laps
from one midnight to the next:

the valve clutches and clasps
at wet clapping truths

but they slip away like silk scraps
in the black gap breeze.

The heart is no throne, but wrapped
gnarl - the abandoned winter's nest,

denuded strakes of burlap strap
curved and curled into the branch fork,

disguising the lacuna and the lapse.
Does the river gladly pass into the sea?

Or does the sea sip it down, easy as a nightcap
with chill willow and spruce,

another blue vein-line snuffed on a map,
another salt stone silting an unseen reef?

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

My heart is tabletop -
the rest of me is the filled-in border
of jigsaw pieces, hanging teeth
around a maw; the middle is missing.

I am also the beheading bluejay
slicing the tendons of greenery
that waver in the rain lens
imprinting on glass and shadow.

I wait on street corners
for specks of truth, beauty;
"That is all ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know" and all that.

But I have a quicksand heart -
step and drown.
Wreathes of blood shiver inside
in murderous curtains.

I vanish in front of you:
This world has no middle in it,
& what little remains is draining out,
teeth strewn in a garden.

I have stopped leaving this room
except for exigencies. Why bother?

Deadened clouds skate on the face
of the black rectangle every night

no matter what moves I make,
& somewhere up and out there

is a numb and strangely ovular moon.
It's all very far from me;

I wash my hands of all of it.
I watch the strange geometries

of strangers sitting tipsily
along the hypotenuse of Columbia Street,

laughing and singing happy birthday to Joan.
Joan is wearing yellow. While they all sing,

she gazes into the lush sinew of the trees.
A thousand years ago...

this street was just a brackish pool.
A thousand years from now,

serpents will bathe on the brick wreck.
But tonight... Joan and her circle

sag and slink into lavender flatness.
Soon they are specks, and then nothing at all.

To Meg Eden, after reading her book

Ugetsu - a shortening of u-sei-getsu, "A moon obscured by rainclouds"

There are towers of water standing
in the distance. They're waiting for us
to complete our denouement
before the fat, snapping rain drums
against the pebbled elephant skin
of street sick, slick with black petals.

Rain clouds obscure the moon,
headless, heedless, puffed out,
bruising wildly overhead
even as the veil comes loose.

We had this miraculous day,
as if nothing had changed.
You were still exactly yourself.
I missed your voice more than I knew.
Your keen eye, the same clever lens,
it held it all in, the same as before.

Your lovely, quiet soul...
I hardly know what to say;
I cried until my face ached
after you walked into the hotel.