I am looking away
my head in glass

across bell wedding hill
where fireflies lace over

green ******* of evening
bounded by bay grace

when a restless thought
slips brain pocket

& hides in castled teeth
like a relic of sugar -

a friend I gripped too tightly
when grief rose above my head

she pulled away gently
leaving only her name behind.

Ah! Here is a line of groomsmen
humid row by the bower

the last is the man she loved
he's brought a wife, a child,

& he won't catch my eye
I know he's broken her heart.

The towers of love have fallen
quietly in our private groves

stones bearded over with cold moss
until indistinguishable from hills.

She said she got out of bed with me
feeling halved, as if something was removed

during the night. She called us the zeroes
in the hundred, with the world our one:

we got kicked from bar after bar
when she blew up at me, threw pints

& chairs, and then later we'd make up in bed
until we were both crying from the toll.

Friends would pull us each aside
& whisper warnings, ask if we were sure

this was what we wanted (of course not,
but in for a penny in for a pound).

In NYC at the old pine bar on my birthday
she got so drunk she fell from the bar stool

& sobbed on the floor that no one loved her:
"You should save her, even if you can't

save yourself," said the old devil
conjured when I was 4, still there at 29;

I listened as it made secret promises of love
in exchange for burnt offerings, broken meat.

I remember the slip of her hand in mine
while she stepped around a tarnished

subway grating for fear she'd fall through
& be lost to the stone: "That's it," she said,

"that's my worst nightmare down there -
to be all alone, hurt, crying out from a well,

crying from the dark, the wet dark,
to be in a place where no one gets rescued."

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind
which binds the passion.
-Thomas Aquinas

June sun wakes and slowly rakes
its brow, a lemon-clouded reach

that staggers broad-brushed fringe
& stumbles over tenement bustle

awash with sweat and coffee steam.
But under modest morning's facing

flower riots of desire:
bitten lips pout in open windows,

coarse, carnal hands glissando
over fruit in grocery bins,

a stranger's barking blossom laughter
a little too long and loud to be entirely proper...

Even here, where my lover tightens the knots
with one hand, shining scissors in the other.

"Then I realized I had been murdered. / They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries, and churches / …. but they did not find me. / They never found me? / No. They never found me."
-Lorca, "The Fable and Round of the Three Friends"

I dreamt that I died in green,
on a midnight hill slab
where the grass was speaking

in the hungry language
of new summer:
"Your headstone is but a tooth

gritted in my lawn jaw
gnashing the June fog
while wind slouches

into the crutched arms
of the evening maple wash.
Who will find you here,

your tongue throwing poems
clotted with moss and mood?"
I woke to a jousting shadow

charging up the wall
& the toddling pink sun
lathe spun to brighter pool.

The dream of death
hung from my ear,
whispering of green.

Join me, in this tumbledown
brick palazzo ruled by the bones
of a queen singing and swearing
that we'll never walk alone.

We can read in the oak pocket,
order ale from the cellars,
watch as the hanged man
steams with oily nostalgia,

well-waxed stories blossoming
& shrugging from his trolley tongue,
tales of silver-roaded loves he's had,
back in a lawless youth.

Love is a game you can't win,
insists the hanged man,
but if you're oh so careful
you can lose very slowly.

When I’m in the dark
All I want is him,

Blurred silhouette warm to the touch,
Skin to skin in the dim.

When the contours in the corners loom,
Hold me without sight.

In the dark, and nothing else,
We are one shadow, slight.

When the lights come on,
Unfortunate details grow.

Like a **** from a crack,
A blemish in the snow.

In the savage of the day,
The barriers of our skin discrete,

We just can’t make sense,
When light and eyes meet.