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.

I walked out last night,
barley-headed,
soul burnt down to a stub,
into a black chassis
fenced with star -
my hairy-eyed heart
carried on so.
But I am thankful for you,
my friend,
who so easily righted my keel
back into the tide
with a graceful turn.

Your words sift the holly,
brace the moon,
they are petrichor
in the lavender fields.
They come across the sea,
I eat them like pastilles.
I refresh the screen in hopes
that they have spiced the page.

The way I imagine you now,
in this moment,
you are running,
lifting the beach fleetly,
trailing a supping sun -
go, then, and know that the world
is so much better for you.

I grow older,
my body fails,
it's just what you'd expect:
corrupted voyage,
blossoms turn away as they fall.  
I become convinced
we are unusually alert animals,
drifting in a soft chaos.
I fill my spaces with alcohol,
& with her.
The sun marches away,
saffron step,
& the day is throated.
I just hope that my love
doesn't come too late.
Or if it does,
that I can be wiped away
easily enough.

The earth moves
according to its natural principles -
I love you according to mine.

Youth has left us so quickly -
the sun was once
a sweet saffron bolus
we swallowed so eagerly
fat day after day.

Now it's a quiet yellow *****,
that chokes on its own easting and
goes down like a horse pill in the west.

Instead, we are with moon -
I pull you close sometimes in tide,
then you're away waning, waning -
doldrums, tantrums.

If only I could swing low over you,
in your green rain town,
& not be pushed away.

It's no longer easy
to share the days with you.
I fill with ulcers
that bleed all into me,
the body the echo of the mind.

But I love you on natural principles -
you have touched my life all over.
Where I go, I bring you;
you are still the voyage home,
even when your replies come
so terse and lacking invitation.

I've been drunk for days.
Last year we were to be married -
this year I have a bleeding ulcer
& I cry every morning,
medicated with scotch.
Your name is a meadow.

The glass stands here
in the lee of the rattle;
the sun's yellow syrup erupts
into this bottle-breeze;
I will signal to you
in the ways you understand;
I will be your silver armor,
your lance and pennant.

The fog has an edge today,
gashing buildings in two,
beheading the tree line,
dispersing the relays.
The sun dies in the east,
throttled by an accumulating
grayness that chews.
Watch the rain approach
on its blacked skate,
drowning the ironbound
fence-work that skirts
the blustered apartments.
This neighborhood
is lost to me -
it chokes and retches
under a slip of sick.
The moon is just
a drain plug.
Wherever I go next,
I will paper with you,
your ink-sugar eye,
the unconscious throne of hair
that throws me over.

There is a mourning dove
cocked and tense on the olive sill
in dense rain, watching me.
I could fly to you,
if I were built like that -
hollow-*****, flashing past
these green and pink limits.
My arc would be unique,
no little starling chop,
no house finch bolt,
or fish crow sine,
past seeded wood to the sea,
I'd manage the upper air,
the transparent sinew,
landing in that little fork
by your slid window;
the song I'd sing
would fill your heart
with new choices.

The cherry tree pauses in
mid-pink detonation
as streetlights snap off,
a negative yellow sinus
in the soft-shelled skull
of dawn's first sagging.
My house is sold soon,
sterile without you
& your sun-stamp.
I will move closer
to the greenish loom
we both loved.
Here - a handful
of raw blossoms,
an invitation.

Dearest E--,

At your name,
an inner empire went to grass -
there was no saving it.

The aftershocks were felt
for several hours:
wracks, throbs.

The ****** sun wouldn't stop,
bright gristle mounted on acromion,
though the afternoon was finished.

E--, you can't shave me away
with distance; I know it pains you,
so here is a compromise:

you will be adored, but so quietly,
so politely. See, I can be reasonable -
I won't even send this letter,

Though I Remain,
Always Yours,
Evan

The earth is hungry for me.
I feel it in every step,
in the way the green
morning sun grabs
at my sleeve on the platform
when the metro train arrives,
in the gnashing maws
of blooded cloud
that conceal the moon
like a mad aunt.
I've kept it waiting so long,
forty years now;
it caught my father
under the wax-window,
& removed him
to a place in the air.
The lithium salts laughed
& laughed when I found
a shadow at the bottom
of the night-bottle.
I no longer lean out
over the sick, slick hands
of the river when
I go to the waterfront bars.  
I'm still a step or two ahead,
but let's face it -
the tree leers in leaf,
the stones are snide,
& my eye looks so dark
in this whisky reflection.

The moon wears a dull brown gown,
& the stars seem braced up there,
a few tired Christmas bulbs
pinned to a threadbare pine.

Dublin is just as far tonight
as it ever was,
& again I'll sleep alone
in an alien city

where fleets of black-bellied cars
crawl among the funerals,
over the fur of the earth
roughed and matted with rain.

In this last push before sleep
I'll choose instead to remember
your susurrating hair,
fanned across the pillow.

Cherry florets
volley the branch-ends
in a new rain -
the attention of this world
seems endlessly divided
as I patrol envies of holly
and hyacinth, hands full
of Thursday.
You call me,
your hair grown long,
we chat a check-up
over your pasta.
Out the bearded window
infant blossoms crack out
into the wet drifts -
forgive me,
I am so bad at goodbyes.

Wednesday night drunk,
the sun lays so still
in its gray sarcophagus;
the sandy mid-rise
across the way
spits yellow blandings
into dead clouds;
the Aberlour bottle
raking its way
towards recycling.

O, that casual dismissal,
how it decimates -
"Thanks, Ev. You too."
But what do I know
of the little surgeries
of her evening?  
More whisky spills -
the sun's canopic heart?
I drank it,
it's gone.

Larkspur rose with azure head
in that blondish vacancy
by the metro line:
you were a summer.

But now those withered faces
are mute, closed for business,
peacock's burst plumes:
you are a winter.

The empire of the morning
is falling, falling.

The cold wavers a little,
divides, and collapses in colonies.

The sun feints behind acute corner,
advances west at a bicycle's pace.

Crows wag in the mulch,
scrabbling at petals,

cawing at the noon
that stands any moment.

I sit with the book
you plucked from the air,

joyed by it. I hope you call -
I will shave.

My thoughts of you eclipse
every domain of the hours:

the morning's empire dies, but
a confederacy of afternoon is raised,

& already there is a plot
putting forward a kingdom of night.

A blitz of hairy sun
broke the neighbor's
camel-breaded lip
& thumbed its way
into bed with me.
The new couch
was shining
like silver bread,
& the cat stalked coinage
across the wainscot face.
Pulling myself
from Saturday's tomb,
I mutinied against
this frenzied easting,
befriending a bottle
whose contents
was gauze for the heart -
even at 7,
I can only think of you.

The clouds keep dying -
I eye them from this rooftop,
sitting in blue wicker,
living exactly one year
in the past, back before
you took that selfie
in the plane's oculus,
the one I printed out
& put up on the fridge,
on your way to Istanbul.
Covid spit out 9 months
of long distance and maybe
something died between us,
like these clouds die -
softly, slowly, failing
in the early evening.
You entertained someone else.
When I visited Dublin,
you could barely kiss me.
It took ten days
until that toll was paid.
Now you're still in Dublin,
the green city I love so much,
visiting those parks you lent me,
running to the sea
where I bought you a high tide.
I still live in Washington,
so ******* alone,
sitting on this red rooftop
watching clouds pass away,
not knowing when
I'll see you again.
I've given absolutely
everything to you,
so please grant me this favor:
turn your handsome hazel
to this blue chair
where I down scotch
after scotch, and find a way
to save me, because the night
is coming so quickly,
so quickly.

Night, night...
hammer handle.
Unzip this skin
& spill the salt.
Moon veers to ink
as it dreams
through the screen,
& darkness rides
the blotter.
Clouds cough,
sick over the spot
where you slept.

This morning I watch
knitted clavicles of light
hurtle in and up the wall
in my half-packed
living room, while cubes
of fresh spring hew
strongholds in the
birded birch yard.
But I am ready to leave
all of it for the ruptured
gray weeks, the rain lash,
the fog bars, the burnt sea,
the little tilts of rainbow -
for her - would she have me?

Let me tell you
about the holly
out the left window,
how it flashes
with silver hilts of sun,
mint buckles
in the afternoon -
I want to share
this with you.
Most of my thoughts
don't reach you anymore -  
annihilated quite gently
by various kinds
of distance.
But in the strange chance
you cross the glass wall
& find these words:
you are adored
more than any holly,
any silver, any sun.

I talk to myself
as the night arrives
in little caskets
slipping over
yellow rooftops.
Winter slithers
& rattles back
under the doors,
while spring slews in
on orange cloud.
I say your name
& a luster throbs
across the walls.
Late hours are
breach born,
full of bent bays
of lamp light,
I plead into the ceiling
until I fill
with sharp shapes
draped raw,
& my little speeches
perish in gloves of air.
Out of the window,
black ribbons streak
the riverbank face
to the moon etchings.
High tides blot me:
I still feel as I did
when I met you.
You're a heart shaker,
you wrest the lid
from the world,
your joy fills
my naked mouth.
But something
has gone wrong,
hasn't it?
Disordered,
melancholy -
you, too, see
the night-caskets,
don't you?  
Dublin facades
vanish beneath
rain scissor arms.
But it needn't be so -
come and lean on me.
I will remind you
that spring is come
with green armies
of blithe devotion,
trees flick
with leaf,
& you are loved.
I know you don't even
like me to call you babe,
not anymore, but
I'll live with that -
I'll tell the floorboards,
the starlings and magpies,
the unsealed horizontals
that report at dawn:
it will be alright,
it will be alright.

Angry-headed poppy,
come deliver your sleep.
I want the black dream
that comes at 3 am,
& leaves only when
the numbers rake across
the face of glass.
O ****** poppy,
bring me the blankness
of your dry child -
my beloved slips
into scarlet wine,
she opens to wavering night,
without even my hand.
I down myself with coffee,
then wake with poems
erupting like lilacs
over a new grave.
Sweet-headed poppy,
come distribute your sleep.
I need the black dream
that comes so late
that it blinds me
to the ways I love her.

Our chemistry
is so wrecked.
I adore you -
you don't adore me,
but maybe you do,
you are so depressed,
we're just waiting that out
& seeing how things feel after.
In the meantime, you treat me
alternatingly like a casual
acquaintance and a former lover,
while I am unwavering in my
devotion to your cause.
I cried for an hour at my desk
because I am so unhappy.
Please let this end,
please come back
to who you were.

The simple sun today
just aches away.
I go outside,
bloodshot-eyed
with trembled lip,
& join the withered pip
on a whisking walk
to break away from surface talk,
to escape my vacant nest,
the closing tightness in the chest.
When I'm back I yearn
for your return
from the green,
the awful, awful green.
But I would take the green
with a smile if it would mean
I'd be with you,
no hopeless queue.
But today? The simple sun today
just aches away.

I'm inclined
on green couch -
I work towards
my best face,
my wrist angle
marries the *****-light
to the pane-shadow.
You, so darkly pretty,
totally oblivious
to the agonies
of little cameras.
We talk too few minutes,
say goodbye too soon,
fumble with the chemistries
that still crackle between us,
despite your wall and wine.
Little cameras reveal me
the wrong way, but
they bring you to me
across the thousands.
I'm redeemed
when my heart
pushes for you,
sweet glass.

Ochre chaperones
watch stolidly
as I bawl
into floorboards.
But I hold on
to my hopes -  
"best vibes forever,"
I promised that,
& I'll keep it.
Amber eye
on the pole,
please don't tell on me,
let me sink to
the laminate tonight,
choking on name.

Lulled on whisky,
listening to the rain alone -
I'm tired of living
3000 miles from your
bread and salt,
which is to say
I believe in us,
that there are ways
to get this done,
& move the sea step,
clean our slate.
When you smile again,
please remember me.
I am the one waiting
on your smallest fraction,
thinking of you...
it feels like I am always
thinking of you.

My hand thinks
of your hand
when the little mirrors
in the street
are broken by
bibs of rain,
& when the white
box clouds
billow to a steam
cuff horizon  
& when the gray collars
of smoke
stand from
sinuous chimneys
over starched
winged elms -
& when we talk and
compare notes
in the lonely ceremonies
of the afternoon.

We held hands
as we approached it,
the pink, black,
orange monument.
We stood as if we expected
something from it,
but it failed us,
an indifferent oracle.
Your hand slipped from mine
as you stepped closer,
for a second you were
inside it, eaten whole
by its hide glue mouth,
before you drifted
in diagonals
to other colors.

We built a little night
but you emptied it.

Your Dublin beachhead
is all undertow.

Dead menus blow from
one gutter to the next.

Westward parks
fill with fever.

A gibbeted sun
hangs ignored.

O darling...
I'm not this way,

I'm not this way -
remember what I am.

Stay in
late on Sunday,
when sleeves of keening rain
drape downcast hollies by the street.
Come here...

There's no more romance
in this February world,
but we can still miss each other
and say little love yous.
Night will still drop on us,
it will still flake away from us,
& I will still curse the distance
from my low, black chair.
I may only be your halfway darling,
but I'll gift you lakes of kisses
until the screen goes dark
& the evening covers my name.
The moon is so still,
like a removed lung.

The rain plows leftover vapor
off the street, and into
the fawned sugar yard;
it's almost spring, and your birthday
is around every corner.
For me, nothing can dull it,
not even this smother of sun
screaming into the blanket,
or chilly gods that straddle
the graves of the air -
winter holdovers.
We are paused.
This gives me down
a jag of ****** noses,
& stain to salt my eye...
but I still adore your new nails
that pop scarlet,
your cloud of hair,
your count-coffee thoughts.
I hope you don't mind
that I can't always speak
without this heart-warble,
& that New York
doesn't wait for us,
not this year.

I packed it away for the fourth
or fifth time tonight, moving it
between the boxes, cotton cherries
spilling in hands, thinking about the selfie
you sent from the dressing room,
like an audition. You needn't've:
you already had what you wanted.
Now I send the dress back to Dublin
with your other things, because
I don't think you're coming back here.
That thought comes out hard - touches
some places that don't like touching.
I'm wracked long, long into the evening.
Please, come back for this dress -
wear it and come out with me,
we'll go back to our secret square,
just like years ago you can tell me
about the snow brothel again,
I'll eat all your pheromones
& make little moves towards you
in your lover's skin -
white dress with cherries.

Burnt sugar spangles
checker a green wall
the morning I'm on
an emergency call
with my former therapist,
who calls you my
major adult relationship,
& she is right.
Of course it hurts,
to lose that.
There's her, and then
there's everyone else,
& it doesn't feel close,
does it?
We're in a strange place.
I'd give anything I own
to board the next flight
from Dulles to Dublin
& nestle into the crook
of your arm over coffee
& almonds.
You put everything
you had into this one...
Instead I'm selling
this condo so full of you
that I can scarcely breathe,
moving back downtown
where the whitish blots
dip back and forth,
& waiting, waiting,
for something to change,
You just have to be patient
until she is ready
for one thing or the other.
& then it's noon,
& the call is over,
& the bobbin of sun
riffles back its little coins.
One thing, or the other.
Or the other.