Across the initialed table,
thin-limbed within
a pink NKOTB sweatshirt,
flicking pencils at my lap,
nest of blonde hair glowing
under the humming ballasts
of the lance-long bulbs,
she still perches, smirking slyly.

I can't shake her.
She is installed somewhere
I can't reach. I remember
all my childhood crushes,
but only this one is so vivid.

She invited me to her birthday,
at her house, knowing I liked her.
She fawned over a boy
from a different school.
Every poem I've written
about her names him: Adam.
I cried in her yard, bundled inward,
went quiet, waited for my mother.
On the ride home I stared
as the green fields striped by.

She grew up, married,
started a family. I kept track
only through hearsay.
When she died in childbirth,
I surprised myself by crying.

I was a thin child
playing in the backyard
in February of 1989,
when I was called inside
& readied for the funeral
of my first cousin, once removed.

For many years
I remembered it
being a cicada year.
but my memory was wrong:
1987 was the year
I put my hand to a tree
& accepted a sleeve
of placid red eyes.
I also thought
there were leaves falling,
but that too was wrong:
by February, they were
fine brown powder.

The family gathered at Arlington,
I stood stiff in my good clothes
& remembered him
as best as I could,
alarmed by how sober everyone was,
& by the unending white teeth
of the earth, breaking through
all around me.

After, in the car,
my mother told me
about the accident in 1958
that took 31 years to **** him.
He "lived a kind
of private hell," she said.
At nine, I barely understood,
was terribly shaken.
I thought about it
alone in my room
for decades.

After that funeral
it took years for a death
to move me more than
the cold day when I was driven
to my cousin's body
and his unmoving blood,
which was lowered to a place
where I could not see it.

The morning I met you
there was a yawn
set in the ground
on N street
where I once worked.

The cranes shifted
great hollows above.

I met you at the intersection,
where a contractor yelled
with the joy of living.

We both marveled at it
and laughed.
I wanted to talk to you,
& my thoughts
walked between us
like a third person.

In this city,
of course,
we opened
by trading
professions,
which felt
a little softer
than it sometimes can,
& things blossomed
very slightly.

We reached the corner
where I branched away,
& I impulsively introduced myself,
& I received your name
in reply.

It stayed in my teeth
for most the day,
& climbed
into my thoughts
where it wound
its way back
into the winter world
in this poem.

Here I am
in the deep curve
of the pavement's push
toward salt-bleached ends.

There is a stillness
within my ear
so that I only hear
my hanging breath,
wreathes of frost
like smoke rings
in the dried sub-zero.

Snow is coming,
probably the usual
Mid-Atlantic dusting,
though it falls fat
like the soap flakes
that I poured
from a box
when I was
a child.

I distrust quiet.
I need noise
& music
& voice
to still my inner self.
It reminds me
over and over
I don't belong,
I don't belong.
Snow dulls the world,
wakens the mind.

The late night thoughts
are far the worst.
They part me out
like a side of meat
under the butcher.
I lay on the bed,
the cat kneading my gut,
& I think yes, go ahead,
turn me inside out.

The snow comes
as an ambush,
though you could almost
sense it, vaguely.  
The traffic slows
until only
the city trucks pass,
with the rattle
of rock salt
which skitters like dice
across the face of the street.

No more passersby
under the yellowed blush
of the streetlight.
Windows of the neighboring
buildings are closed
against the buckling gusts
of wind so cold it hurts.

Nothing left against the snow
except myself.
When the mind begins
its thoughtful treason,
& advances the first pawns
in a despairing game,
I have no good defenses.

Open the window,
catch the scent of snow
over the world,
& feel attuned
to the many pieces
of the clouds,
that fall and fall
until they vanish forever.

The first thing that happens
is the world collapses.
That is, it reduces down
but only I seem to notice.
Everything becomes flatter,
the depth stripped away
like rotted lumber,
like when they gut a building
but leave the historic facade,
and I feel like I'm limping
postcard to postcard
until eventually like I'm peering
into a discarded diorama,
where everything is smaller
than it should be,
the crudest copy of itself, and
everything is bounded
by shoebox limits
I can sense them everywhere.

The second thing that happens
is that I avoid everyone.
I avoid my mother on Christmas,
I can't look my therapist in her eye,
I cancel a date because
I can't handle the contact.
I touch my skin and it's like
touching paper that's been creased
hundreds of times -
old pulp that frays and splits.

The third thing that happens
is that I lose interest.
I put in whatever minimums
the day requires
and not a scratch more.
I put my mail aside
and watch crows
gather on the branch,
facing the valley,
black eye to black eye,
base wings folded against
the sleek unbearable body.

The last thing that happens
is that life cheapens.
It's hard not to notice,
since the papers and the news
and everybody's phone
blasts forth the parade of death.
No one is spared, children,
animals, the happy, the hale.
And soon these thoughts -
that life ends without reason,
that God has retreated from the world,
that no step is worthwhile -
begin to bleed in my head.
They lead to the paralysis
of a patient wrapped in gauze,
leaving only the eyes free to move
and notice the great black wing
that scythes into the valley,
feathers dark as stout,
the sun setting in its usual
incompetent way, the wing
so graceful that it might be
the only beautiful thing,
falling out of sight,
into nothingness,
down the *****
into the stale dusk,
into the exact center
of a limitless depression.

Let's get it out of the way:
The solstice tomorrow
gathers shadows
in the blond alley,
building a translucency
until a black flood
of night shapes
soaks across the walk,
empty since it's a ghost town
this close to Christmas,
and metro is empty
but for us lovely few
who need the paycheck,
and this winter is too warm,
it's unsettling,
and a little grinding sleet
wouldn't be unwelcome.

I find myself
with a date tomorrow,
despite convincing myself
that I should really be alone.
I always choose this
immediate connection
and that has to change.
I can't follow the flaking flame
into another courtroom,
I can't dive into another
sly, wild eye that I box up
and store away for when
it's all come down,
and I'm too alone by half.

Six of us here
in the bland and zinc-white
waiting room, small
machine on the floor
burning the air
with brown noise.
We're nominally here
for group therapy,
but in truth we prefer
to ritually founder
in great excesses of civility.

The therapists all but plead
for us to say right upfront
exactly what we don't like
about each other.
That's uncomfortable,
and each of us toys with the idea
before securing the old masks.

My own mask isn't the Venetian
kind, or the grotesque
Twilight Zone voodoo variety,
but the clear hospital type,
used to inhale great lungs of ether.

Sometimes sincerity creeps
from the gaps,
sometimes I do my best
to collapse into this checkered chair,
close my eyes and hide
in the sound of my blood.
It sounds surprisingly like
the brown noise machine.

I'm up against it.
I'm not getting younger,
and these feel like last chances
to learn to be, in a way
where I don't end up
shut away, eating myself alive,
riddled with depression
and loneliness and long black
strings of guilt that resonate
like a tritoning cello.

The thought carries:
The six of us
are an atonal sextet
of numbness and refusal,
dread, attraction, the works.
Around us, the whole room
is phthalocyanine green,
blue shade.
Therapist's preference,
probably calming,
soft music in the eye,
and it almost works.

But instead I am lost
in new haircuts,
in leggings ripped
behind the knee,
in the way a lamp
hunches over like an ibis.

Anything to avoid it,
anything not to admit it,
admit that despite years of this,
years of looking out
the high window into
the red riot of Farragut Square,
years of forcing myself
to say terrible
and incriminating things
while rain and snow
attacked the window,
I am still sick with feelings
where I must belong to someone,
must be deeply known,
or else I've never been
anything at all.

My therapist is pregnant,
the same therapist I once appraised
while I sat clinically depressed
on her clean gray couch,
my burnt umber eyes scanning
inappropriately.

As I imagined her
with hand of wine
in a brick wall restaurant,
I justified myself saying
that everyone does this,
looked at their counselor
and imagined closing
that very fragile gap.

But my fantasy was brief,
broken horribly by the things
I had to say about myself.
And now her soft, wide belly
stings accusingly even
as I give my sincere
congratulations.

No wife, no family,
no children here,
just more lithium,
another year down,
another breakup,
and another "fresh start."
Another notch on the mind's cell wall.

White noise is falling
from the treetops again.
I'm looking for a new apartment,
touring the giants
up and down 16th Street,
wondering if I'll cry here too
across the ancient parquet,
& who I'll bring home
to share coffee and deep jags
of insufficiency, feelings
I should not have shared.

Everything is eventually
unspoken, everything is.
Keep the heart off the sleeve
for a change. Hideaway
in the dull bronze candle
of winter city sunset,
gently tarnished with old snow.
Pause on the high Taft bridge,
despite the height,
and drop the heart away.

It's a lie,
I couldn't do it.
The heart sticks
in the hand.

Stare at the world,
so oddly marine,
with blue-gray air
that hangs in wet sheets.
The breasting wind in curl,
a wave sensed and half-seen,
the lull-quiet despair.
I move slowly, beat by beat,
carving idly the clean pearl
of moon, breathing the green
stopped life, thoughts unfair
but true, that the heart cheats
its owner. I drown in my defense,
in the poison of the past tense.

It flickered in the air,
sagged branch to branch,
pushed against the windows:
a death was pulsing.

It spilled into the streets
of my hometown.
I opened an old phonebook,
the names were humming.

I was cut to pieces by it.
I knew her as a little girl,  
she knew my sister
in her hippie period.

The telephone lines cowered
beneath the gray massing of moon.
The faces of houses screamed
ceaselessly at me as I drove.

It is so insistent,
her sixth-grade smile
in my old class photo.
It hovers inside me.

Out with my ex wife
almost in the old haunts
like the bar where we saw
the Hungarian jazz band
with the wild accordion man,
the same bar where she first said
it was over, all cards were dealt
& it was a losing hand.

Bringing her there,
more angry now
but less burdened,
clearer in that way,
as she coaxes me out
from the silent shell
I wear as habitually
as the old houndstooth coat.

Drink after drink -
coffee, coffee-flavored beer,
just beer by the end -
felt like old times.
Walking the miles,
the benighted embassies,
trying to guess them by flag.
Seeing us, you might almost
believe the night didn't come
& chill us to the bone.

Green on green
          scrape
add copper
          scrape
add blue
          blend
               scrape
     blend
          scrape.

No matter how hard
you carve at the pigment
with the long flat knife,
the canvas tooth retains
the wraith-stain imprint
of the older image.

Ah, burning wine,
how welcome you are,
when the black static sky
crackles with cold.
Brown noise in throat,
rye seed glow,
slow unguent
of gentle forgetting.  

I've lost the shine,
surface marred
then polished high,
the flaws are old
as my childhood coat,
lost in the woods' green dough.
Ah, brennivin, you have no judgment
for my ritual bloodletting.

I knew four or five like him,
loping through the flicker
of the motor oil bonfire,
the tainted, boundless promise
of the devil's ďeal as plain
on their faces as the tattoos.

Always bracing and braced,
like quarry-blown stone
that only seems featureless
until you look enough
to see vein after vein
marbling it.

They are memory men,
resurrected by the news
that Lil Peep is gone,
they still stalk the fringes
of the old bonfires,
some of them consigned
to do so forever,
beer can in one hand,
***** in pocket,
the other hand full
of something, anything,
as long as it filled the hand.

You're glassed into the closed door,
gloss across you like an aegis
against me. On your phone,
your eyes come up, see me,
send sorries, draw down.

In my first visit to the store,
I remember pamphlet pages
and seeking quinacridone.
It was the white wreath
of your soft look that I found.

Umber hillsides tumble
steeply into leaf, pine steeple
vault and nave, brook vale
dim to hush, branch dam
licks dusk, red lake
drains to night, tight-drawn.

The clock was set back,
and now night rots
away the afternoon.
Gray light spills,
slouches, sloughs
into my hair,
my hands, across
all these strangers.

Ovals of alcohol
keep the rain away.
My life is moving
stave by stave.
I used to go to school,
have a social circle,
idle through hobbies,
new days, new days.
What the hell happened?

The garden is filled with gods
and beggars and dull, fat cubes
that gather rain.
A bronzed angelic family nods,
weighted neck-joints, tubes
of browning flames.
Arrested drama, perpetual frown,
wrestlers mid-lock,
eyes into the sky.
I can relate, my luck's down,
girlfriend's gone, I'm stuck
to my skin, lonely.
Easy to imagine the appeal
of the museum garden life,
to be appreciated and secure,
with a fat cube friend's repeal
of flat love, a new bronze knife
to cut into the meat, to cure.

When my date
stood me up
for late coffee,
the sky poured cloud
& my heart turned
over some blood
with anxious moves.

I was
"as hollow
& empty
as the spaces
between the stars,"
as I sat
& watched
from a hired car.

The street lurched,
& the stoplights
had coins
over their eyes,
twinkling.
If this was
the final ferry
over Styx,
I could hardly
feel more prepared.

The driver
said nothing
as the passing world
degraded down
into some blots
on the backs
of my eyelids.

Silver-sided rattle,
a humble streak climbing
the hill in small doses.
Blue teardrop seats,
steel and yellow poles,
broad-eyed windows that offer
the view of things that the subway
will never give.

I've seen fistfights,
a baby born, overdoses,
old women falling asleep,
old men screaming wordlessly,
junkies scrambling for pills
dropped underfoot,
tourists grappling with the geometry
of this unknown language,
all of it.

Vibrating with a menacing stumble,
it attracts everyone. It promises
a view and a destination.
It's better to go through the world
than to sink below it.

The worries
come on the walk
back, melting
together like ice
in the glass:
I'm missing
something,
& what pieces
remain
are broken,
& that I am
never in control
of it.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

No, you don't
see a thing,
I'm sealed,
a sarcophagus,
a remote satellite,
the flood
is put away
as neatly as
a magazine
on the newstand.

I make another
oath, to pry
open the tomb,
to speak with
a mouth
like a glen,
to accept
that I am not
my parents
nor the drift
of their silence.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

We lapped the ice as it came apart,
breathing the thick frost in pieces
that melted in the lung.

We raced. It all caved in
before our eyes, chrome drop,
aching flakes mounted our hair.

Faster, Emily, faster –
loosen the knees that hold flight in them,
as white evening’s fallaway comes.

I quit two miles before. I sat in the car
and watched in wonder as you hit the vanishing point
and became this snow lyric.

A quartet has lulled me
to sleep this week:
Ardbeg, Bowmore,
Talisker, Laphroaig.

I'm holding this in,
living coughing strings
of days oh so carefully.

Walking home
through the drowning
grove in the sunken park,
I vacillate like a nurse's hand
choosing veins. Either way,
blood is coming,
with a blooming bruise.

My particular curse,
falling into these affairs
that end up straitjacketing me,
choosing the wrong things.
I need someone who'll reach,
but narrowly, narrowly.

Cold rain,
& silver fork.

The date
moved from
winter night
to a gallery
where it
paused and
other things
moved
beneath the
Tigermilk.

Dazed,
I lost more
than heart
& the next
day the stress
carried me
on steel wing
to shed blood.

But I was clear.
Maybe things
were reset a little,
or maybe
I worried too much

because this
new thing
was already
spreading
across the inside
of my skin.

I.
The tattoo needle
feels like
it's sinking
to scrimshaw
bone.

II.
These words
you say
are sinking
to char
marrow.

Who stands off the square?
    The Monday girl,
    blond with rain.
Where have I followed her?
    Through the canyons
    of the eight o'clock city.
And what does this mean?
    I have always felt
    that she knows me.
How alone am I?
    The moon curdles
    and crumbles.
And now that she leaves?
    Embrace the green air triangle
    that spreads out shining
    with wet, fog climbing
    from my mouth as I chew
    cloud after cloud,
    forcing the world to accept
    my abstracting template
    rather than face it,
    face it, that she's gone.