A year ago today,
I walked the dark canal bank,
water chopping the long stone
as we went to the grocery
& bought wine and meat.

We cooked, fed each other,
as the wind came down
to shake the branch.
My mouth was full of love.
My hands played cat's cradle with fire.

Oh, love: you were a camera,
shutter snapping my best days.
I posed against Wilde's grave,
when the magpie played
with your blue boot.

You caught me against the red trees,
you caught me in the flat green.
You caught me among the rare books
scented with old glue, you caught me
with a Guinness in my hand.

It happened a year ago,
but it could have been this morning.
It could have been twenty year ago.
My life has not moved on, at all.
I see other women and feel nothing.

My Irish and Turkish girl:
What did you do to me?
The swans in the canal glanced my way,
the distillery cooked their malt and grain,
& my life froze forever in a high, foreign place.

A year ago I stepped into the green coffin.  
The Grand Canal was so sweet beside my feet,
by the one-winged bridge. Then the ocean
receded, a long sand-salt, beckoning.

Now, I am in the long black river city.
The leaves fall to their little deaths
on the illuminated sidewalk after five.
The twilight bull charges in on deadened fog.

The Wharf's anesthesia blanks out
while new yuppies roast smores in fake fire.
A blue tree shines from the reflection.
Cars park in yellow spots, music dies away.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day
that I flew to the emerald. Now I just air fry
sweet potatoes, listening to old Bowie,
shedding blood into the dead rug.

I miss my green coffin. I laid there so still,
so quiet. I heard the birds and the drunks
in the early morning, crying out; I miss them.
I took the train back from Phoenix Park,

where the cross recited a towering prayer above me.
I walked among the O'Connell shoppers,
the Georgian families, the sweet swans...
I have become nothing at all. Nothing, at all.

Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. -Ahab, Moby ****, Hermann Melville.

The winter's body shakes in little slops
that beat against the window, sloping
upward out of the dead-leaf carousel
into the black sheet-fold of cares.

I shaped my life around someone who is gone.
Therefore I have no shape - I am a vapor,
a bolting-breeze, a formless sherd of glass
freed from the vandalized car window.

Every breath is glassy, an anesthetic
that numbs me to the next one.
Every beer and scotch liberated from the cabinet
helps me drift toward a wet oblivion...

What now? What now?
I don't struggle with dollars or dolls,
preferring instead the silence of the studio,
the slow march of ink across the face of it;

it snowed this morning.
My heart gave way. I opened the window
& let the frost enter the bed:
the scent of bitter coffee floods the air.

"Sleep: those little slices of death, how I loathe them" -Poe


In my dreams I am always dying -
a Sicilian orange rolls down the walk,
the yellow branch-hand lets go,
& the starlings have all flown.

Why bother? My childhood sweethearts
are all miserable. Their children
have their own children,
terminal sin after terminal sin.

Ambulances go red as they float
slowly down the street. The dream ends
in a strange puff of vapor. Clouds die.
**** bodies move, then stop moving.

Let's face it: little slices of death
bring dark oils to the cheeks
of the depressed canvas. A skull in black
stares at the keys. It's over. Over.

I'm just sitting here,
thoughts sieving through the pane
in little tarry slices, sluicing slurs
or slurries against a night
of Georgian house-faces crowding
their brick-point cheeks
eastward towards a flat disc
of frost, cut with black wings.

The storm glass has birthed
a wicked ammonia flake
from the quartzy ethanol thigh,
which I guess means rain
will break in soon to blotch
& pock the walk, breeding
petrichor into the wine-dark
water-heart of sinking air.

I make rough gestures
towards civility and society,
keep the words floating above
the sutured margins of the wound;
wouldn't want to alarm anybody.
There is no rescuing sleep tonight,
only this scrying glass clotting up
with starburst funeral wreathes.

Deoch Bhleth - the fourth drink of the morning, taken while the morning oats are being ground

The heart is drowned in dream
as the body motions towards coffee,
whisky, water, pills.

November slouches in slowly,
all sharp shoulders
& muscular knees.

The black circle turns and screams,
the beacon spits morning news,
an island of misery emerges from the salt-froth.

The wet streets are slicked to a shine;
I've gained weight. The day moon
is pregnant with blue.

Blood is thin and slippery in the vein.
The razor leaves fine lines all across my face.
My arm is singing. Psalms drop from the sleek

yellow womb of the ****** sun.
Alcohol climbs within me: I fall back on the bed,
thinking of her again. Where is she?

Is she staring out at the magpies
that gather on the wet lunch-branch?
Is she by the Liffey, watching the slate glint?

I am trapped in this plaster tomb,
my head a bridge between past and present;
somewhere a chain is being broken.

Deoch Chas-ruisgte - the third drink of the day, taken while still barefoot

Face to face with soap-fingered morning,
an abyss bounded by vapor trails,
an unblinking eye stares back from the glass.

Once, I woke with a lover in this bed,
her hands braced against my back,
as if keeping me from falling.

Now the daylight is my chilly crutch,
a mocking rain-ring sliding over
the madhouse orange of the turning trees.

When I was a child, I was left to my own devices;
you'd think solitude wouldn't poison me this way -
yet even the afternoon breeze shaves me down.

The little cat and the sunbeam
do their daily pas de deux
while I think about the blood-flower

that emerged from an angel's mouth.
A year of snow-tides, of shipwrecks...
Oh, god...

Froichd-uilinn - the second drink of the day, taken while propped up on your elbow

I sink my bones, crooked in mattress,
lower the liquor to lip as calving sun
leaks through the east-faced pane.

I think back to La Fontaine Sully
in La Marais, on the way back
from the graveyard...

But to what profit?
My memory slices me open,
revealing a slow web of star-gutted stairs.

"Immer augen" my grandmother says,
or said, or will say. The street slouches
with honey-feet, red wine drips into the river.

Fashionable diners spread themselves
across the sidewalk. Laughter launches
like stones into this tower window.

Old thoughts are a slaughter.
A marriage didn't happen.
Bright lights against the meat-black

of night, the shroud-cloth
over my own face, lips wet
& shining with liquor.

Sgailc-nide - the first morning drink, taken while still laying flat on your back

A caustic belt of autumn sun
flings itself through the glass,
yolk wasted across the blood-rug.

Last night's final slug
of scotch sits waiting
on the blackcloth nightstand.

I gather it into my fist,
take a look at the blue syrup
of morning light...

I will tell you all
that the first morning shot
glows like a new blind heart.

This future is mad with silence,
while the past asserts itself
in lost faces, so many lost faces.

I have a bruise on my face
that I can't recall getting.
I don't remember the evenings,

although last night I cut my hair
with a rattling metal hand
that sharped at the skull.

Each morning is a scrape.
I don't recognize this lonely man
in the acid sluice of mirror.

I watch the flash of their eyes,
the inhabitants of this mansion
who sometimes hear the rats
rushing downward in the walls.

Perhaps they pause for a moment.
Perhaps they have an upsetting second.
But they make their way back to the bar cart
& pour another grocery store *****.

Then there are those of us, my reader,
who step into the dark below the basement,
into the hewn room with the odd altar
covered in very old stains...

There are even those among us
who find the unfortunate stair
that leads down into the bleak bowels
where subconscious reigns,

where the sins of the father
are visited upon the children,
where faces are married to the pit,
where you can only stumble forward

until, at least, you reach the black lake.
Looking down, having eaten yourself
with a red smile and the knives of love,
you see your own face in the still water.

****** wine-light crawls
the window ledge in Chelsea.
From our hotel room we can see
a blond wig fall to the floor
in an orange room across West 28th.
Out on the street, brown beer stains
spread across the peculiar night cloth.

People who can forget can let go;
the rest of us will remember
the way the moon rolled over
the highrises in Little Italy
by Gelso and Grand,
& got stuck in her eye;
I died more than a little.

O, Van Gogh... I am the swipe of wrist
that doubles your ear outside the Christmas brothel.
I am the heart that falls out of your mouth
into the green jelly of the absinthe glass.

The pearl toenail of sky curls and curls
into the split skin of the world.
I stop at the bar on the way to your roses,
drinking aching rye with the bearded bartender.

I aim the gun at my chest - it's so heavy,
all this black metal. My heart is so sick.
The nacreous clouds roil and roil,
& trees turn bus-yellow, taxi-red.

O, Iveagh Gardens... what I would give
to be back inside you, among the secret fruit,
the elephant bones, the faceless statues,
the richest green I have ever seen.

But I am not there. I am in this white hell,
I come from a cancer family. Cells disobey,
clump and grow. Soon I will be the age
of my mother when the breast cancer came

& lived in our house with its chemical face.
When I am ash, spread me in Paris:
even if you must bring your own *****,
dig in Père Lachaise, in a corner,

& funnel me into the brown pit.
Let me rest among Abelard and Heloise,
with Oscar and Edith. Where I strolled
with my heart in my hand, my dead hand.

Exit Tchaikovsky into the smoking mirror,
humid masks of the night servants
stalking down the water-walk.

Ash falls from a high tongue
all across the face of the moon embassy
like a bony comb through snow's hair.

Fade to brass: the cars sneer across the street,
interrupting blonde melodies held rapt
in plastic by cigarette Rapunzels.

I sit by the flower dress.
Bare legs slip across the old eye trellis
that masses by the death-green park,

muffling the memories that break free
from the black seance. I'm a braid of regret.
A bird is dead on the cement.

The orangish streetlamp breeds sick spots
that stick to the gray street; the cubist bus
throws yellow beams into the insect air;
the humid black collapses like a bad hand
into small pyramids of dead cloud;
gel-bleached eye-fillings branch out
from the faces of strangers, full of vinegar,
unfriendly, averted. This glass of ***
is dark flecks on a hollow. The night-face
rotates slowly with metallic disease,
old scars that shine in the uncanny swell
of dust that breaks loose in the children's mulch-park.
She is long, long gone: a tomb-scrape in Paris,
a walk to a cafe where the yellow liquid waits;
I stalk through the stars, and then die up there.

O xanthous brickwork, your scars
canted with shadow... my mirror platter
cries on the left hand side, and cool air
settles in the burnished tree tops.

It's almost October and the days just pile
on top of each other without any meaning in them.
I wet my face at the vessel, soap to soak,
waiting for the death of the aloe flower

that perches on its lonely stalk,
defiant and sorrowful, tendril shaking
in a cold busker's breeze.
Scuttling traffic claws into the dim hour,

the sun wests away; brick goes dark,
browning like steak. The air rises
into the ape-hour to meet the landslide
of dead angels flickering across the band.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.

Blue-bruise gore slips
down the slick mirror face
of the lithe knife that skips
between the ribs - I've looked
at our old photos again.
Rotting ash knots choke the slow
red rhythm of the blood.

A bird dies against the window pane,
just a small thump in rain.

A ghost-head cinder
leaps from a white stalk
thrown to the gritted curb -
the moon is a wrecking ball.

It's a night to fold away
my thoughts like old sheets.
I let my submerged face swim
like a black-scaled fish in my glass,
before raising it to my lip slash.

The roof tiles peel away.
Bellies of shadow perish
in the autumnal cascade.

This grief settles in the grave-gully
of the pillow. Crooked queasy dreams
rise like foxglove from the sheets.
A thick paste fills my mouth: sleep.

All the missed opportunities,
the collapsed, balled-up destinies
entwined with small scotch:
the heart misses a beat

when WhatsApp chimes in:
a message from A-----,
who got the wheel moving.
She's had a baby in Dublin,

but is looking to move back stateside.
The whole year waves violently
as it drowns in a Glencairn.
The clouds are fried on a rain griddle,

grease-dark, the outer bands
of the hurricane carcass.
A catalog of dresses sails on down
the long cement string, oblivious.

My little cat sleeps on the red rug,
& my old friend reads the legions
while I pluck at the silver tomb-pall
of my two day shirt.

Turn on the dread lamps,
let the bitter day escape into the vents
of the cyanotic eve - another fell day
chokes itself black into the withered ether.

Blackly digging in the ten o'clock hour -
the rain already came and went -
the District is dying of moon-steam,
a summer that chokes even the princes of air.

I am mortally alone. My chaperone,
a brimming glass, turns a blind eye
to my piling thirst. Pylons of shadow
gather in the alley like barren trees.

My monstrous shirt clings to me,
accentuating the beer-pounds.
I pray for a swift end to this grit-grind,
a legacy of revolving abandonment.

Numb, dulled, I stare out at the sparse
traffic cleaving to the bitumen, red lights
& bare legs floating by in the wheeling hour,
tone poems of pale flesh and sad laughter.

This is very close to the bottom:
the scotch that scrapes my tongue clean,
the freshly washed glass, the beckoning bed
that promises only dead dreams,
                                                          pillows of sand.

Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.

Dearest,

I sit with your plucked wildflowers,
in the near blue hours that ramble past
like a coach-and-four. You return
"upon the morrow” and I have said
your name aloud so often
it is thin as gold leaf.
Crow's speech marks the new day
under a gunmetal fog-dome
that slips spells in the sinking heat.
The gray river sidles along the city;
I'm out of time. I send my love.

Up the black, sticky stair,
break into the wet street
just before eleven; a girl
with lopped lilac bangs snarls
in profile while curling beams
seep from her cell.

I walk home, avoiding my reflection
in the shop windows, mumbling
the pine bird sermon I heard years ago,
when I was drifting drunk
in the fire yard, full of honey and ash,
bottles popping in the pit.

Let the night slide on -
let the black gull draw down -
The door closes so softly
on that old smile...
The sheets on the bed
grip me with soft, cold hands.

This is my left hand in the mirror,
twinned and pinned to the glass,
hanging in the black valley while a song
rips me along the old perforations,
& the whole moment splits -
the light wavers over the mantle,
a ball of ghost, a past thing,
memories sold away in ingots.

This sordid exorcism hinges
on night pictures that I can't shake:
a backward lens, a frozen belt-step,
a long lawn with green marrow.
No, that dream is just watery pulp,
like when you squeeze a plum too hard
& the juice sticks and stains
in the white noise web of your fingers.

Something withers in the gut;
a light goes out. Air dribbles down,
down, settling in the soles of my feet.
I'm alone under the wing negative.

The seething mottle of clouds
brushes past, old bruisers.
I am trapped down here,
in the memory cycle that lurks
inside all the glassware.

Everything that came before
seems like it happened to someone else.
There is no after; slices of globe
are dappled by thoughts that get lost
in the salt-surf marrow. Rain claims
an errant soul with bolt-iron drops.

I dabble with shadows,
eating them like hors d'oeuvres,
but nothing's enough for the broad yawn pit.
A green altar sways in the vowelish breeze,
a light blinks on, but suffers back blank.
Imperfect things, loving imperfectly,
sweep down the road, thin as eyelashes.

The stair-shadow bar
a blackwood twist that swims
& recurves under elbow and pint.

Eyes knock in the false, exacted twilight,
against the yarded backdrop
of felt puddles stroked with chalk.

Here is a glass of rye - it waits
in amber for the pink warm wash
of my prowling, kissing palm;

here is a glass of Powers - the sweet
scent flowers the stale angles,
fumes away beyond the lip line.

Things can't quite be read -
what does the canted shoulder mean
when it turns my way?

Words tumble into the chrome-crumbled
struts of the barstools. A kölsh floats into me,
then two, small columns of silted yellow.

On leaving, I am amazed to find
the cheer-charred night, rude gestures
of moon sweeping the towers,

& a fearful silence that finds its harbor
deep inside the glen of my ribcage:
a barking heart, chained to its house.

See-saw thunder dives in the eaves,
whipping rain snaps and jaws,
lightning wrinkles the pale cheek
of the sub-city in the distance:
lit windows are yellowed eyes
in a ashen face dotting the fat flat edifice
across the road. Steam-oars extend
from a pinnace-cloud that races
across the flooded jowls of the evening.
I offer these things to you, sweet reader,
because she is not here. Join me
in this storm as it evaporates upward
into the strange and blankly lidded salt of moon.

The great key is twisting in the lock -
the keyhole moon is spinning.

Empty bottles rise like grass
from the ceramic tile.

The scattering people on the street
slice little hunks of joy

from the black slab
that squats over the city.

The sky is vacant,
the stars vacuumed away

so casually, replaced
by a fat cobalt shroud.

The scents of gin and ****
finger up through the humid cloak

before disappearing from human record.
This bed is a pit of silence,

a soft red hell, a place
for lonely drunks who turn the world,

waiting for her to come round,
come round, come round.

There is a cough and a bark
& then a roar, and suddenly
the green night is singing.

A light rain hangs like a history,
the silver toad bus squirms stop to stop,
the street racers flick rubber kisses.

In the opposite building, a woman
undresses before watching a movie:
the rain begins to flop and hook.

A bicyclist shines and streaks down
the sleekish funnel. The moon is forgetful.
A love story is playing out on the sidewalk.

The green night cascades smokes
with sharking clouds that drift north
into Maryland with their lethal line.

The cat sleeps on my great-aunt's rug:
I am alone in this quiet. Something is dying.
I watch the rain dry on the summer road.

little birds swerve
into green chandeliers
in the park hexagram
with a seethe and a sigh -

hungry angels fill the air,
the sun gripes with marthambles,
melancholy fills a larynx
& light-shells spree across the walk.

I spent six hours at the bar,
wet talk and high song,
but the bier-bed at night's end
beckoned with red vacancy.

The aloe flowers are dying, drying
to flat little coral-colored bell-shapes;
hungry angels and little birds
peck at the windows just before noon.

Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.

Errant firework in the distance,
folding sun in a west bed.
The evening is dying, canceling
away in the purple shade.
I walk south, west, west,
until I'm on the mirrored water,
a new Narcissus in the valley,
among the rusted thighs of the city.

Everything is a memory of her;
the cocktails, the coffee, the sherry,
the faint scent of rosewater,
the long theater grass.
But now it's cleared away
by ice cream men and sirens
as far as the river steps,
the descent into the sunken palace.

An orange layer blankets the evening flow,
& the haunted asphalt is a black spine
of humid trees. She is gone,
but her outline remains everywhere.
Tonight I'll wander to the whisky bar
& buy forgetfulness.
A distant sky presses in;
this place is far from everything.

I was a knotted shadow,
walking under a bridge
in Dublin, brick water vault
under the grand canal line,
on my way to the coffee shop.

Now I'm a sun-ray, lost to scatter
on the bolt-broad walk,
lost in a carpet cloud,
lost, lost. I'm in another place,
where the wind off the river
tassles the tops of slate roofs
on its way to my corner windows,
a mocking push that carries no salt.

I am sure I will not see it again.
I will go out instead, forward,
out into the alleys and greeneries
& grassworks and cementings,
to find something new
that might replace a wet shadow
full of coffee by the sea.

Well, here I am, without her -
in this new dark space
where I'm slowly breathing.
I pour another drink in the dark -

a few tremulous stars
encrust the subfusc city mantle,
& a bus growls off
down a flat hallway of road.

The floor is paved with books -
the cat sleeps under a half-moon
that's curled like a rotted aloe leaf.
How are things in Dublin, I wonder?

The night pools in the air,
above the sighing branch.
The kitchen is smaller here.
Grief leaks into the tight hours.

I see a bathroom light snap on
across the street. Birds clap across
the row. A car races down the rack,
& one more minute stutters away.

The mulberry tree is night-ripe,
its fruit fermenting almost before dripping
down the branch to the gray-saddled sidewalk,
where birds refuse it; the sharpened tang
slips and spreads into the green closeness.
Char-wings spread out above me,
interrupted by static bursts of cloud
that stream from a southern vagueness;
the waxed crescent moon-blossom
spits a little of its milkish shine
towards me in the black heat.
The lance-lights of the streetlamps
snap on, lidless and yellowed,
venting that yellow down
into the wet cut yards.
Everything is quiet, empty;
in a cardboard box by my side
is her sketchbook, our locket,
her old phone. I look through the glass
at the blue cape that drapes
the sandy castle across the street,
watching as sleep comes for me,
mincing through hillside pines.

E--,

I packed your things today,
preparing for my new place:

donated all the old yoga clothes
ticked with high-tide sweat-marks -

kept the Turkish coffee set,
with its flattish copper faces -

still unsure about the books
that wait in the azure evening,

pages fluttering in a rain-wrest
that waves in with thick stacks of heat.

When we spoke last night,
it was like you were recalled from the dead:

The familiarity of your face and voice
filled this pink brain with ancient urges

that were almost immediately canceled
by the deep pauses of hairless hearts.

You are not really here,
although I sense you in everything.

The yellow Dulles gate is open to you -
if you choose to take it -

but you won't choose.
I am a forgotten drawing,

penned long ago
in a sketchbook left behind.

E--, you are a shadow,
standing in for a body

that still masters me
in all my essential motions.

I can't escape you,
& miss every minute

that our breath called common.
This sky is just a pale sapphire sheet

you saw hours ago. But now,
as you turn in for the night.

I send you my best.
Always, forever yours,

Dreaming of Dublin,
Evan

Woe to the world, the sun is in a cloud,
And darksome mists do overrun the day;
In high conceit, is not content allowed;
Favour must die and fancies wear away.
O heavens, what hell! The bands of love are broken,
Nor must a thought of such a thing be spoken.
-Robert Devereaux

Goodbye, mockingbird -
I must leave you now.
I have often watched you
hash across the yard
from your holly station,
chop chop chop with such vim,
from the leaf to the post
to the high-lidded lamp
that surveys the night dispassionately.

In return, how ungrateful I have been -
what terrible things
I have offered your shining bead
of an eye. In your tenure
on the gray-green sill
you have listened to the sharp salt
of my many difficulties
with perfect equanimity.

But now I must go.
Perhaps you will find me,
across the living ruins
of this capital city,
in the raining triangle
that corners down to Dupont.
Or perhaps you will stay sentinel
over this nest, deep in the green.
I will miss you, little bird.
My two brightest years
passed under your wing.

Ah! -
Summer is here -
No, stop -
Something is wrong -
Gray rain collects itself
into chilled coal-water in the road.
Burnt cocoa & cigarette smoke
fill all the engravings of air.
Thunder arrives in bands of purple,
as hawks circle in the twilight,
piercing the configurations of grass.
The mockingbird slips from the holly,
as if embarrassed or ashamed
to be associated with this high fog,
this greenish pallor.
Where are our shadows,
that played upon the brickwork?
The sun refuses to commit
to this dismal June.
Rain begins to fall,
late in the morning,
& all throughout the afternoon.

Soft-boiled sun-yolk
spills west, and sill-shadow
splits and spreads
across chestnut slab:
a stillness - someone's missing.

Little nooses of rain extend downward
in black runnels from the char-cheeks
of death's head pillows that scrape
off the humid rust from a mid-afternoon.
Throw open the windows, let the dark
steam that climbs from the lawn clippings
approach the nose like an awkward dog,
until it clings in the back of the throat,
to be washed down with raw scotch.

The rough breeze dies in the shaking green
berries that dot the holly dome,
the rain stops in the street, chastened,
& fat clouds grease on westward;
she's not here and she won't be again -
her cast-offs lie in shallow oubliettes,
in shadow-bottoms of torn paper boxes -
but this new-shirt weather speaks her name
in the Braille-pecks of new, blue sky.

The purple folding face drips
into the cake-colored battlement:
night is here again.
The sun has kneeled into the treeline,
into the gauze-clouds
whose humid cobalt heads
hang, hang, just hang
all angled like hammers
in a carpenter's belt.  

Everything seems to be ending:
cicadas have erupted
in tens and sevens
with bright scarlet eyes
to die on the sidewalks
in little hums and hisses,
looking at me through
whetted blades of lawn.

I'm moving soon, to the point
of the old triangle
where we haunted
the coffee and ice cream store,
where she stole a little shining spoon
that we used to mix the luminous milk
into the coffee pool.

How will it feel, after dark,
under unfamiliar high-stippled ceilings?
So quiet - she's gone -
her vacant clothes
no longer flutter in the closet
when the breeze slips through.

Will some rain come,
blue-brushed brow,
& wash this feeling away?
I feel the night moving,
crawling on insect feet -
the air is full of absences,
great holes that go unfilled.

The wind is settled in the east,
and the clouds are gathering
heavy hems.
I find a single dark hair of hers
on the inside of the pillow case,
years later,
years later.

Blind, inconstant love:
you rose up and shattered
on me like the burst salt wave
over the night promontory.
I was so unprepared...

And then you receded,
back into the sea, impossible
to differentiate from the rest,
the only traces of you
what remained on me.

Once, I was a man standing
in an airport, holding her -
a meadow of sweet, a hand
that browsed my secret self,
an incandescent eye that found
a gasp in the gap. And then I wasn't -
stripped of my companion,
I succumbed to whisky's scalpel,
lonely's pollution.
Now, fringing a sorrowful noon shush,
I watch an orange crossbeam throb
of crawling sun die by my foot;
considering this, I meditate in this glass,
pushing whisky into myself with serious intent,
pinned down by choices that are not mine;
the days slouch forward, despite themselves.

O sweet friend:
I'm glad for you.
May days never end,
O sweet friend,
but always extend
with verse's glue.
O sweet friend:
I'm glad for you.

O moon, I will save you.
I watch you rise in the daytime,
stunned by the squat cancer blue,
overcome by snappings of cloud,
letting go the night-anchors,
looking lost up there.
I passed out, drunk
for the second time today
& when I woke up,
you were broadcasting
several degrees deeper
into a fool's gold evening,
a sickly sweet beacon, luminous
almost to the point of absurdity,
I saw all your seas and mounds
unskirted. You seem alarmed,
watching my wounds so closely,
yet absent of gesture,
an affixed milk-marrow.

I will save you, moon;
after all, I am your Sisyphus:
I push and push at you
with these soaking stanzas
& each night you tumble back.  
Do you remember rising over
the Hotel Tiquetonne in Paris,
when I tried to prize you
from your socket
above the church in Les Halles,
& give you to her?
But you resisted, so I exchanged you
like currency; the stars so fluent,
bands of bleach in your halo,
you grew hair that fell out
in screaming stripes,
& I ate tartare at midnight.

O moon, I know now
that I cannot save you -
if anything, you must come
& claim me away.
You seem happy in your tides,
so certain in your arc and arch,
the delight of little elevations
in the black valleys.
You are the knot in the bark,
celestial gland, eternal bone
that rules over all bones -
so come and get me.
O steady eye-knuckle,
someday you will rise
over a world that is unencumbered
by my step; by any step.
In its last days, the earth
will call you home,
long after my memories
of Tiquetonne seep into loam.

Cyclical cinder, little ash,
you will not weep -
you will not weep,
O salvage moon,
but will transmit the final stanzas
of a requiem to a world
that cannot speak your tongue,
but will understand the paleness
of a poem that is dying.

My father left me
when I was four.
After that, I saw him
on weekends,
& discovered he filled
his coffee cups with bourbon
& sipped it all morning,
taming the demon day
while I watched the early shows,
                             insensate.

Now Dad is gone.
I am past forty.
The woman I thought I would love
long into the purple evening
has left me.
I fill my cups with Scotch
in the early mornings,
fail at meditation,
sip away the dead days,
the dead days.

O little cloud,
where have you gone?
You sink to wisp or worse.
Your grayness turns bone-white,
then a cancerous blue
until you are nothing -
no, you are nothing now.
Your grave is the air
that I breathe.

I sharply decline with you;
you, up in your vault,
waiting for the densities
that will crease you into rain,
I in my mug-clutter,
my liquor-ploughed
library of ills,
try to cope,
come to grips.

Little cloud,
you died a long time ago.
You were reborn,
& died again. You've died
so many wet deaths.
I understand.
This is no world
to live in more
than a day or two.

It is six fifteen in the morning
when you call me,
worried that I'm not well.

I hold you in a little tired slice
of choke-glass blooming
in an smear-eyed hand -

I face you with all my blotches,
try to splint the break,
to be where you are.  

Maybe you're right -  
your love undoes me.
The hours are pauses, aches,

each more or less intolerable.
If my heart slumps away
one of these smoked spring nights,

an unbeating gore-stump,
carry me back to Dublin
& spread my ash-seed

in Iveagh Gardens,
where I carelessly left a dream
among the cane apple husks.

Drink whisky
& recite one of the hundreds
of poems I sent you

to the water-ruined statue
near the rose cage;
maybe someday you'll be curious,

and find the ones I never sent,
filled with sorrow's rennet,
sour-salted, reeking of rain,

retch-cairns
to the halved honeycomb-husk
it seemed like we were becoming.

So of course I both live and die
when your ****** chime
breaks my false, papery day:

I love you above all things,
even now, when you turn half away -  
I don't think you will turn back -

but are you really done here?
Are the white lilies really dead
in the bleachy vase?

This is not what I wanted -
the black wing, a door closing -  
I am living the wrong life.

Dear J----,

How many suns died,
out in the black margins
& burning headrooms
since we last shared
any words of importance?
I look out tonight from the roof
towards the endless upper branch
& swear a few have blinked away.

You strolled in so casually
from my dream, as if from the wood
or park, and common strokes
moved in the air between us.
Your words fork across
all your grassy miles,
as you tell me about the fox-scream;
I can almost see the starlings
hash across miniature cubes of lawn.

I live in silver -
the cars that flicker right to left,
the metro's metallic hide,
the strange inflorescent cloud
that garottes the coinish moon.
I'll lend it you on afternoons
when the rain deposits itself
in quiet blue discs across the city.

Go now, and know
that I am always grateful
for another friend, especially
when they understand
how hard a heart heaves
across all the bent years.

Yours,
Evan

A gaunt green so full of song:
a lark bunting nests in the holly,

under a marmalade chariot
with Catherine-wheels:

I mean both senses of the word.
Self-lashes leave stripes thin as days.

O, how I move my hands for you,
from pen to wrack, choking away

the sobs, sometimes, because
your city is far from this city;

but other times I run my thumb
across your kitchen scrawl,

across your glassed-in face,
across the things you touched

when the dream was living.
The gaunt blue princess

holly quavers beyond
the trellised net, thronged

with twig now: a little bird
caches its frail life away

from a cat o' nine tails sun
that is whipping & whipping.

It's another late night
when rain strokes the yard

into gore-blue slate strakes.
Beyond the almond-thin window

a car hurtles into a red away
at the same time

as your face pushes
through the plum-colored

angelfish orchids
right to my blanket eye

as I wake from a dream
about snow in Dublin.

A moon bathes in Judas rain,
in dense yellow shadow;

although I am so alone -
I have never been so alone -

I feel your presence
in this strange convergence

of a flower's face, and
the memory of motherless snow.