While her plane taxied,
I had already entered a sort

of personal sarcaphogus,
built to contain the click

click click of this radiation -
errant atoms in caustic traces

throughout the salted air.
It's a mechanism, keeping

me sane in the face of
this sorrow of her exit -

I walk in dazes, and joy
falls away in strips

like bark from a sickly tree.
So I count the minutes of the days...

These words are
    your soldiers.
These poems are
    your armies.

Let them march
    to the drum of joy.
Let them march
    to the fife of sorrow.

They will always obey
    their general.

Flurries drop
into the river
just beyond
the Navy Yard.

The flakes divide
at first, but then
the air warms over
the dull marine chop

& they get thick
& woolly and just
stumble into gray
dough-castles.

Snowfall only drops
for a night or two
& then it waits for
entropic days.

This morning's cigarette
I bought at the airport in Rome.
It wavers in a cold district
as I question my romances.

Dear cigarette, little acid stub
on a tile, you lived your span
in a long winding fume:
May my own life stick
to her hands like smoke.

Two marriages
lay like stones
in the desert
behind me

& yet

I'll be sizing
rings with her
this weekend,
this new bond.

The heart
is so irrepressible,
so unregenerate,
so sincere,

even as it risks
everything.
I hold my breath
for years.

I'm inside the silver
train, whose hard
yaw sway recalls
wristwatch midnights
when you'd pry me
open text by text.

The train chatters
black chisels but
your letters still flow
across the underworld,
where you agitate
with Quixotic chemistry.

The doors slip
against the platform.
As I split the gate,
you remind me that
without a polishing hand
silver sleeps in tarnish.

When will we talk
about the leaving?

Walking beneath
the red castle tower?

Across a sandy lawn,
where a glass wisp
moon perches bitten
in the blue quadrant?

Drinking Autumn
down as the new early
night rolls into the air?

No, the next morning,
in the empire of our bed.

The window aches
with excess sun, and
my mouth flakes away.

There is a
bent blue hill,
a green pool,
a bleached heart.

Remember when
we saw Lucy,
in the checkered
room, that drowsy
drunk woman
leaning against
my back, singing
every word?

There is a
red elm blaze,
a white tooth,
a bleached heart.

Can't you feel
I'm trying to say it?
Look, I know
words are not
my bridges.
I feel them perish
between us.
Can't you see it
on my face?

There is a
gray brick crumble,
a yellow deadlight,
a bleached heart.

I'm alone in my room.
There is a green-skinned lamp
casting a level wave
onto an orange cat.

Bourbon, on the rocks,
waits in a shallow brown shadow.
The open window
is a breezy mumble.  

Peerless girl,
come inhabit all the sweet spaces
of my slowest imagining
with your light and wild step.

The man in the white
sequin jacket shoulders
his way down Q Street
to 17th where jutting

red lights tint night
on blacktop, folding,
splayed across the feet
of the ladies strutting.

Screwtop wine's pylons
trip the turn as throats
strain to cheer & scream
as favorites drift by,

spitting "come on,
baby," then float
away, down the dream,
slipping us some thigh.

Behind me, an Italian
man breaks up
with his boyfriend over
the phone.

Around us a battalion
of truculent drunks
with fabulous drovers
ride some rolling crones.

An old sad cuss
continually thumbs
some poorly angled
shots of legs

Racing for the bus,
we quilt our memory from
spare light spangles,
wild dregs.

The sad old dracula
totters down Lamont,
smells like brandy.

White hair puffed
with talcum or flour,
last year's grease
paint blood running
mouth to chin, collar
turned out high,
swaying on heavy
feet among the happy
terror of children.

He sits on the curb,
falls asleep.

Who knows what
escape he sells
to himself, what
weight this dissolves?

A toddler leaves a fistful
of candy at his feet,
for him to enjoy when
the sun is thrown out
onto the street.

In the Paris giftshop
the one deep wing
of the vermilion angel
lanced the outer dark.

Outside,
draping olive lines
scattered and resolved
abstractly as trees.

The world was
filled with
incompleteness.

Back home,
with the second wife,
the night was fragrant
with barbeque,
nicotine,
& vetiver.

Having no direction,
I drifted into
the smoking rain.

Years later
there is an arrival
that thickens like glass,
a transparency,
a screen that flickers.

It's her, and
she's red-orange too.

An investment,
a face in gold leaf,
a pale labyrinth.

This time,
years later,
the deep wing
is a drifting veil,
and the olive line
connects us
like boardwalk string.

The glow of the glass
is a resolution.

The Winged Nike
of Samothrace
is installed inside me:
first the anxiety
of the reach,
straining for more.

Then the frozen music,
the perfect shape, even
with pieces missing.

New dose
switches on
around 2 pm.

My mind shrugs
off the shape
of the shadow.

Anxiety's buried
under confident
emerald obelisks.

The day is given
back to me,
engraved.

The slipping sun
is silver,
far away,

& the gloam
is a table
of wet glass.

My glass
is all ice and
cheap *****.

My eye drowns
with envy in
your clean kõlsch.

Neither of us
speak a word
about marriage.

A bared sun tops
a chilly world,
last call's red
trees, yesterday's

rain, this shallow
scrape of hours
that pulls apart,
raw, gin-dipped,

a moon waxing over
the rose bush. This
is our ritual now,  
the breezy screen

of moments that hides
what is really felt.
Speaking your fear
makes it real. The rest

of it is all hard, too
Better to let silence
climb and fall. It's cruel,
those leaves.

My mother and I are
knee-deep in my
late father's storage
unit, which is filled
to the joists with
old math textbooks.

I scrape away the dust,
strange names emerge:
   numerical analysis,
      combinatorics,
         steganography,
             astrophysics,
                 number theory.

We don't understand
even a single page,
we decide it feels
fine to donate them,
the entire collection -
how many years did
we watch these books
decay on his shelves?
If there was a favorite,
he never told us.

Yet what a surreal act,
to thread steps into
this aluminum room
filled with the very
last of his things,
& collect these
books that I often
thought were almost
holy, filled with the
sigmas and matrices
of his high religion,
& now they're just
dust and weight,
                             dust and weight.

A crust of wax
affixed with
breath hovers
near the window.

Doctors retreat
oh-so-quietly,
afraid to break
the soft blood
of this moment.

The hospital
sheets are so
impossibly thin,
like wafers,
& they shine
as a fluorescence
wanders through
the five of us.

My father
slowly assumes
the translucence
of memory.

I know it's over by
the stillness of his hand.

Battle day,
bottle night,

shrug the pills,
eat the light,

wrist of stars,
dripping yellow,

garbled sway,
muting fight,

madeira rill,
salt pier height,

wet ring bar,
moon's bellow.

Andrei,

I was a child
when I read
a piece of paper
& you died.

You were a telegram
falling from the air,
a moth, a stray dog,
a liner note passing
through my hands.

I pressed play
& Chopin unwound
like a serpent,
the mood shifting
like the rainbow
that feeds on oil's skin.

I went out
& found more.
Rachmaninov attacked,
a chess game
where the pieces moved
ten at a time.

& the Prokofiev,
followed me
around the house.

I was a child
when I saved you
with my ears.
Let me save you again.

Come, revenge
yourself a little while
in my old records.

Their eyes slash
like small fish.
I curl away,
ribbon against
the scissor arm.

Forget it, you won't
get blood from a stone.
**** therapists
press their steam.

Tongues hold, even as
words break away.  
Just wait them out, wait
them out, wait them out...

The crowd
busies itself
selling lemons
and shoes,
but beneath
the sweeping
scrapes of wall,
a pyramid
of eyes
greeds for
a death.

Look at this Moor,
with his dolphin
held like a bagpipe
splitting with water,

while beside him
tourists stack three deep
grabbing at their beer,
pretending to ponder

the veiled Nile,
while their eyes slant
towards the open seats
at the cafe and the Aperol

that issues so freely
you'd think Neptune
was pouring it out, too.
The sun is wincing citrus

above the high windows
that overlook the plaza,
laughter cresting above
the tourist scrum, and

children scream with gelato
strung between their fingers.
People like to be close
to history, but not too close.

If the old stones spit water
pleasantly, so much the better.
Browse the pamphlet,
tell the wife it's Bernini,

not knowing that Bernini
once paid a servant
to take a razor to the face
of his mistress because

she slept with his brother,
because history's scrawled
as much in blood as in marble,
and the colossal Pantheons

of the world are easier
understood with a dizzy
laugh and eyes shining
with afternoon wine.

She arrived
on a green wing.

She pressed the little curve
of her smile through a wide

wet heat that dropped
across the nestling city.

I squired her through shades,
worried about her sun-mood,

we drank coffee like mother's milk,
I worried about the green wing

that idled in the black field
of my mind, to carry her away.

It felt like a fairy tale.
Autumn arrived and wrestled

with the bright arm of summer.
The sun died in my pocket.

The moon cried behind gauze.
Corner stores kept selling

menthol one hundreds,
green wing echoes

that pressed on me.
We studied cakes and kings,

we looked at art the new way,
we traveled to the old cities

whose alleys twisted like veins,
branching with histories.

The customs man is obliging,
waives her future a few more weeks.

She has a firm date
with the rain city.

The green wing lolls in slow
circles through my thoughts.

When she takes those steps
toward the old castle,

toward the streets of beer
and whisky, toward friend

& half-friend, my heart
will turn to water in my chest

& the purple day's-end
will fade into a bruise-night

where I sit alone, choking on
possibilities, and wondering

why my hands now
feel so terribly heavy.

The waitress smiles
a little too much
but we don't care,
our little glass lung

of Bordeaux dips away
above slatish cobbles.
A Gauloises whips ash
from a smouldering hand

into the corner table fragment.
Systems of traffic evaporate.
A massive shadow folds
above the grifters.

The river laps
at knees of bread,
while empty bottles
browse the blackness

for their corks.
Beside cathedrals
a dusted dusk glows
& we follow it

back to the hotel.
It's a little room,
our neighbors make love,
& the courtyard roars

with high orange;
I think towards you
when sheets of clouds
betray a skimmed moon,

& we pull sleep around us.
The river tongue falls
& sleek stones gather
to a new language.

Black Madonna,
gazing from a
golden cage,
the iron-headed night
is heavy with song.
Lifted sleeper
in a shining field,
is your vague
gesture something
like forgiveness?

Ginevra de' Benci
has a sullen mouth,
a hooded eye, a cheek
that betrays a cerise

blush creeping from
chestnut curls, her face
is petulance and command -
she's secretive as water.

She loves you,
she leaves you,
you'll almost throw
yourself from the window...

Ginevra has cruelty
hooked on her face.
In that frozen glare,
desire and anxiety mix.

What other feelings,
underneath porcelain wash,
were caught mid-blossom,
fixed there forever?

I feel your thoughts turn
in the wild plum twilight,

as we stroll from
the crooked grocery

to the empire
of mauve carpets.

Your hand draws tight.
Your eye is wet and sharp.

You don't need to say it,
I know the hue and tint

of your just heart,
I feel the cutting wave.

In Arabic, "poetry"
is related to "hair" -

both things sense
the world so finely.

Well, let this poem
know you as gently

as your Rapunzel's hair
knows the evening air

winding through silver
avenues of moon.

What is this church
we've made for ourselves,
with elm-groved nave,
& grass-paved aisle?

What religion
did we raise here,
with insect hymns
of a spotted choir?

What gods did we move
under the maple,
tongues rolling,
chatting with lightning?

Rainwater buttress,
twilight altar, homily -
we built this green chapel
in the ribs of the vale

and practiced our love
in a pink-stained light,
where we were crying
out for one another.

Up on the deck
the pink cascade
of evening stumbled
against a blue stop.
Stars seemed fine
as powder.
The moon was golden,
a Brasher doubloon
nailed to the felted smear
of milky way.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
Fights on the street
scattered under the
water head. Brains
hissed with poetry
as rain dwindled.
We heaped stones
on the truth.
We knew it wouldn't
last like that.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
The world without you
keeps breaking down:
the morning motorcycle
won't stop idling, I can't
cut books from their shelf,
food is an accusation.
Stars abrade, the moon
is sold for scrap.
Where are you?

Dear,
You're out late tonight -
in evening. I will open
at the moon. I might go away
to howl. Return soon,
Evan

Soft cerise band
& slate speckled
with cream cloud -
light birthed on a hill.

Night unslips its hand,
ultramarine, star-freckled,
from mintish trees bowed
low over dew-dappled sill.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

The market of sleep
   is full of false starts
& the gingery moon's
   just a pock-marked heap.

Down in the office
   there's a tunnel of nothing
& tongues are falling
   with heavy high profits.

Brown hair of fall
   blue legs of summer,
fumble the moment's
   drift-hearted crawl.

The night sky is only
   a black dead dough,
& late in the morning
   hands are so lonely.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

I refused you, heart.
I saw the end parenthesis.

I escaped
the ten year wall.

There was an empty,
starry sting.

I pulled my thoughts in,
raised the sail into the wave.

From every corner
I heard C minor.

O heart, I refused you
& look at me now -

stone-mute, castle-hearted,
dying of it.

Night's face
on the pane,
gin's lip slips,
a dark dress spills
into the grave
of unfinished speech.

Yet perfect thoughts
sputter down,
candied eyes
launder the late hour,
& embroidered shadows
of perfect length
& distance pour from
lye-bright lamp.

Each pushing beat
is a kind of fall,
a low broken drum
in the hot dark hall
where the heart
is the size of a fist.

Red clouds skirt
over unlit streets
where the moon splits
like a rotten peach,
crowded in
a low black patch
of night-angles.

Again I'm in the same
unhappy plot,
dropping away from myself,
stiffening into one
whose mouth
is a voiceless half-slash
that a ***** fingernail
might etch
in a grit of clay.

Broken machine logic:
if alone, then woman.
If woman, then alone.
The tape is cut too close to the reel.
The night is too close,
& the reel is spinning:
watch the heart
in trembling skin.

Gravid clouds dome
the mid-morning

when I'm brought to life,
mouthing your name

like a silk gag
between teeth.

My green-washed skin
dulls in the scrape-light

culled from the flat
of the sky. I'm like

a golem, a mute thing
given rough life,

but who is my maker?
Was it you, lover, who

brushed the breeding
moss from my face,

my lips? Who called
me up from the depths?

Fed me breath, recited
the books of the high air,

until I was yours?
Then why am I so restless?

Will I be cast back
with your fingernail

to the wide quiet pool of ink
where you found me?

Their names
in tatters,
old cardboard,
in the dim
school hall.

Is it a dream?
My old jacket
sleeping by green
cinder blocks,
posed by the
locked boiler
room door?

It is a dream.
The snow has voted
flake by flake
and I must leave,
sweeping my tracks
with an elm branch
as I go.

I do not belong there,
in the past, where the
apricots are always ripe,
where the hopscotch trees
frame the laughter of
their young faces
in amber.

I'll visit them
like a deep sea diver,
in the silence
of pure oxygen,
turning over the sea floor
to find their names
in tatters,
old cardboard.

Dear E--,

Sewing gold,
we walked
in the vacant
invisibilities.

In a hush-throated hall
we saw a Last Supper
of acrylic blocks,
breaks of the past.

Wooden masks
deviled the olive wall,
& we found tiles that
turned out our hands.

None of this sustained
you when the sun dropped
beams like pick-up-sticks,
aces of heat.

It didn't sustain you
when my friends
split like copper stills
across the breaded table.

The grand oil lamp
& the sea chant
became ash daubs
of noose memory

when I returned
to your dark room.
I'm sorry for every
thing I couldn't repair.

Every whorl
& loop in my hands
held you tight
as boas.

By the time I felt
your breath settle
into the delta of sleep
things had half-healed.

Still, I trembled
with sharp dreams.
In the morning,
I was yours again -

as I always was.
This is my apology.
Yours,
Evan

Mehmet II burns
in my hand
while we hunt
the Perseid shower
under a waxing
gibbous moon's white
sea broadcast.
Prosecco disappears
inside us. You pick
deck tomatoes, and
conversation gets
interesting by your knee.

The night doesn't end
so much as folds and
folds again, with us
by the very center.
Sinuous silk birds
crease into sheets
just beyond your
delectable ear.
Your breath
a dark ribbon,
a flower of steam,
a door I step through
on my way to the
kingdom of hands.

Come, see the men
waiting for the silver
metro side with
pound-penny eyes.

Their little pistols
of breath break
the morning into
loaves of ash.

Look - the train
is a giant's rattle,
churning us all,
tattooing the path.

The cleaning woman
escapes the door into
a cleated brightness
full of hexagons.

The man in the suit
with the sad wrist
avoids my gaze
with leathery intent.

Look - children
chase a lost sparrow
that flew into
the station vault.

I exit the orange gates
out into the empire
of the sitting sun.
The sounds of the metro

decline into the earth.
Deduct the moment
from your day,
be glad of who you are.

You're the one
who fills my days with pleasure.
Under endless sun,
you're the one
whose joys run
without measure.
You're the one  
who fills my days with pleasure.

Eight years
is long enough
to let yourself have fears.
Eight years
is long enough for tears,
too. It's tough.
Eight years
is long enough.

Under elm spread
a fistfight nearly
happens, but late-age
trolls are content
to roll trash through
the graves of their teeth.

Maybe it was the heat
that made you sign
my name to this spit;
maybe it was the heat
that pushed you into
this quiet bitterness.

Going home in
caustic steps, the
dead clouds fall
like ripe oranges
onto the street.

I can't stop sweating.
Instead of nursing
with black milk
we prepare a sky
with green stars that
came by mail,
untroubled by the
useless, wicked elms.

It's tempting
to restart history
with this nocturne
I play for you.

Let all the books be
an empire of cinder
swept away by an
indifferent breeze,
long diaries of ash
caught in the pines.

Your words, your kiss
will be the first on record.
We will write new volumes
in a ****** world.

But first let me finish
this nocturne I play
for you late, late
in the night.

The tower climbs
in periodic orange,
lung-like patterns
above the slate run,
casting evening in
long frequencies as
I run the face of
century rows.
A hilted moon cuts
swaths through
clouds of interior
peach, piercing a
gin-muted sky.

Blocks of night
advance across
the blue golf course
& empty highball
glasses clink like
bells in the porch
dark. Broad curves
of street rise in
the humid trees,
then sweep and
glitter toward
the hospital.

Four and a half
miles bring me
to the train station,
under the black
water circuitry.
You arrive in your
night-soaked dress,
walking me home.
The streetlamps
are aching yellow.
Rain never comes.
As a we drift home
I feel so lucky that
all my runs carry
me home to you.
I draw a shower,
& a charcoal horizon
tilts, tilts, tilts.

You'll tell me that
you hate this
neighborhood,
& the midnight

adventures
I had years ago
down Dahlia St
& Georgia Ave

will strip away,
thin, ******.
I'll notice
the broken walk,

the dead grass,
the trash gathered
in the raw verge,
I'll be embarrassed.

You'll be unhappy
in the new place
you're in, and
I understand but

I won't be able
to reach you.
I'll have learned
by then to shut up,

grip the air on the
silent street, take
some steps back,
let you have

your thoughts.
I won't be able
to save this situation
with magic words

said perfectly
in a pentangle.
I won't be able to
rescue you from

this drift, I'll
only be a tether,
a hand across
the void.

It'll all be new
and foreign
and everywhere is
a walk in the sun.

Washington summer
will be a hanging heat.
Soon I'll chauffeur
you into the slots

of the city, but I'll know
that won't salve
your feelings.
I won't do anything

but walk by your side
until it all ebbs.
Under the radio
tower in this poor

neighborhood
I knew so well,
I'll still my tongue.
I'll step through

the weeds to the home
where I'll hope
you will maybe find
something yours.

A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.
My puffball proud,
a valiant cloud
has been our shroud
against this fire spun.
A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.

Moonflower,
sewn through the trellis
with your lemon scent,
breasted nocturne blossom,
your intense distaste for the
bardiche sun that swings
across the high meridians,
how I favor you -

I will be your vambrace,
your cuirass, your sabaton -
your ancient metal shadows
that cool you from
swipe of day,
     my moonflower,
until the short-sleeve
freedoms of night.

Were they always a metaphor
for depression?

The green women
living always in the
ice-sluggish river,
waiting with thorn
teeth for those who
don't know better than
to approach their world?

Postpartum mothers who
pull the children back
into the quiet womb?

Every river seems
to have one:
Jenny Greenteeth,
Peg Powler,
Nelly Longarms.

Step out of the water, Jenny -
shake off the cold, cut your
hair, your nails. Toast some
cheese and bread, drink cider.
I won't ask you to smile,
or promise to save you,
but maybe just sitting
on the bench is enough
to keep your feet dry.

The girl from Dublin
comes to me here
under the the summer sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She drinks her new city
a cup at a time,
until her coffee is done.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I love her early
in the curtain of morning,
where the red trains run.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She has wild light
under her step
when she walks or she runs.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I wait each day
in an old black chair
until we can be one.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

The girl from Dublin
waits for me here
under the summing sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

Her beauty is soft
as the day-ghosted moon,
& never outdone.