There is something coming
out of the summer fog.

It abrades the full bellies
of ill clouds which burst

into sloughing rain slices
that slush and slide in soft slips

& slurs as it slouches
through the soak and sinks

sodden and silent and spent
to the wet-stunned cement stub.

Then, a pause - and it is already gone:
a visitation from an unwanted memory.

Shadows rise and suddenly fall
from slick brick gibbets:

cars throw stray starry bars
of slim dim shine from their teeth.

A palace of broken fog
escapes into the east,

leaving a black tabletop stain
fading slowly on the brain.

Coifs of lightning disentangle
under a black cloud lattice.

Thunder rustles to rude growl,
bracelets of leaf are trembling.

We're eastbound, hundreds of us
on this loosened buckle

of corrugated silver flash.
The rain attacks the window

in excoriating scrawls
slivering down into a sluice.

Red-shirted woman, run now,
over the yawning pool

that shivers with addition.
Blue-breasted runner, fly,

fly into clay-colored false dusk
that heaves with humid breath.

Escape from this wet hunger
that walks over us so indifferently.

We stumble nightward. Rain laces
our eyes shut. We're alone here.

Tell me I'm not here, alone -
that I've finally traded this broken meat
for vapor, a stock-share of memory
that wavers through the dusk screen
into a charry blued imbuement -

For a moment, I'm by the riverside
in Paris, eating bread and wine with her,
a small and stony autumnal Eden.
Now I'm dying in Saint-Eustache,
craning my neck into the god-vault...

O reader, I can't lie to you:
I am here alone, after all.
This blood-ended prison twitches
with memories of Les Halles
& Tiquetonne, and that's all.

Paris was, not is. What "is"?:
Medusa's severed head in a cake box;
an anchor of whisky nestling itself home
in the cold iodine of the soul;
my name dissolving into a beard of ash.

Here is the piercing sun,
its lean tongue carving us,
etching our unclouded skin.

Under the yellowed fingernails
I'm in the brew hall by the train,
missing my father.

Where are his memories?
When his liver folded away,
where did his thoughts go?

I hope he waits somewhere
in the yellow spurs of air
that radiate around us.

I must go -
my friend is waiting for me.
I walk down the canary *****

into midnight's arms,
gut full of fat blooded summer,
a fission of grief and understanding.

The stars are out:
rhinestone belts
frozen mid-lash.

The wasp-wax sun
broke its last crutch,
sleeps behind the hill,

& the smeary bone-pocks
of moon are slouching
silently overhead.

We are inhabited by the dead.
They live inside us, smoking calmly,
like a recently fired gun.

The vapor is carving its way
toward the envenomed starlight,
yellowed drips, old waves.

This humid umbrella, pinpricked
with the soft vacillations,
briefly covers us both:

we huddle under the winding,
thousands of miles apart.
Your river laps against the stone,

my river floods the pine path.
We chat about lost cats.
Stars are dying despite our spells.

"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.