When I am gone, the cat settles in
by the door, among the shoes,
guaranteed to see me first
when I've returned.

When you are away too long,
(& you have been away so long)
I dig in among all our words,
waiting for the sound of keys.

Your old card,
"You're My Person"
creases in my hand.

The note is so sweet
it ruins me; my nose
spots blood, I cry so hard.

Even if I put it down
& only touch it
with my mind

it wrecks the afternoon,
a hammer-handle
between the eyes.  

Yet I can't even file it away,
still less remove the pastel
from the black chess mantel.

It's part of me,
stowed deep in the heart,
like a blade the doctors
are afraid to remove.

I also sent cards,
filled with adoring scrawl,
Turkish slices,
raw pianissimos of love.  

I wonder if they split you, too.
I don't know what we are,
only how I feel -

you are the root
of gladness.
My hair still burns

when I think of you.
I am committed to the dark
chancels of your thoughts.

I may be shackled to the white blot
of Washington, but the blood
specking whorl and loop
erupts from Dublin.

Consider this, then,
another card,
sent to you across
cerulean cavity

all the way to your
necklace of river.  
You're my person.

As always, my honey,
I close with
kisses and hugs,

knots and crosses:
"xoxoxo"

Salt crush,
brown rubble
of eye.

Honey low,
string sob
on cheek.

Send sweet,
spun tongue
in tow.

Left spent -
night stop,
black brake.

By dawn's five
I'm hers
all again.

Love, please tell me
where to cast my life -  

The ivoried downtown
and sleeted piers

of Washington,
where the Potomac

sleeps itself blue,
& the rows of museums

pull coffee teeth
in a closed afternoon?

Or the northside quay
& green garden walls

of Dublin, where I walked
in your hand, eyes to brim,

out to Phoenix Park
to search for the fallow deer,

but finding instead
only a debris of wind?

I'm owned by neither:
I wake each day

into a dead space
without color or shape,

only these memories -
do you remember

leaving yoga on
Connecticut Avenue,

the petrichor winding
out the night's full flower,

the nuzzling shine
of the walk?

I don't care
where it happens,

but that's what I want,
every day,

those steps home with you;
every ******* day.

I still see you
laying in the balled dark,
moon-pretty,
pinkish ache,
webbed in lash.
I still hear you
& fall in swoon
when you tell me
in Turkish
that your little left hand
is still sleeping.
O darling...
I stand in the doorway
& let my heart *****
to your ghost.
You're here and not here.
How can I sleep like this,
on a bed so pricking with memory?
In this slush of shadow,
this leavened night breath,
your absence feels almost like love.

We slip-stepped
past snow sprigs
in Iveagh Gardens
to a castle of bread,
cheese, and red wine
topped to pink shell lip.
We talked a whole world over.

Yet two months after,  
you-don't-love-me:
though I know I felt it
glowing in that rose cage,
saw it on a wine-painted mouth
that smiled at me,
a smile of retrieval.

Remember the day
I met you at the airport
in July, at the start
of the four best months
of my life? Your eyes
carried the same regard
for me then, I swear it.

O grand cru -
full-bodied red.
Here's what I'll do,
O grand cru -
I'll drink you
down, then to bed.
O grand cru -
full-bodied red.

I just found
your writing
in the book
you lent me
after we met.

Your name
chokes me away
as it declines across the page
where you signed it,
claiming it.

O darling,
come home,
& take this pen.
I'll lay still
as you assert
your name over me
in your beautiful hand,
rift to rift.

---

I read your notes
one last time
before packing them
for Dublin
with your H&M scarf,
your New York sketch,
some paintings
I'm hoping you like.

When I ate with you
in Merrion Square,

flicking rain
from my eyes

as it wandered down
from the jailing trees,

had you already decided
to leave me?

There I sat, thinking
I was Orpheus,

come to Dublin
to return my lover

to my world,
not looking back

at what she did,
not ever looking back.

There you sat, knowing
I was Eurydice -

to be given one last longing look
before I was pulled

from Merrion Square,
from Dublin, raked over

the sea changes,
until all I had was the dark,

the jilted dark
of the bedroom

that doubled
as a hell.

You are Dublin, Istanbul,
you are Amsterdam, Paris, Rome,
you are New York, Washington,
you are Dublin again.

I'm trapped in Washington -
please save me.
Snuffs of ice winnow
towards me in the mornings.  

Return me to the strokes
of your bed, under the window
glutted with gulls, where the triptych
stakes soft pitches of rain.

Come and retrieve me
from these lidless clouds,
unending widow's eye,
che gelida manina.

Thaw, love,
& hold me there -
I am yours,
or don't you remember?

A black ****** slips stars
into the withered
low-tide triangle
at Sandymount -
     Where are you?

My clenched chest beats bruises
into a defaced molt of moon
& down the quay, pursuing you,
before acceding to reality:
     You are missing.

Black lips eat hours
all over Dublin -
but you sleep safely
in the red yesterdays
of my knot-bell heart.

The grass is sage and fawn
where the flaxen lipstick
ruckles through the brick
to neck the lawn:
I love you most.
Here by this chimney is a dried
crepuscule where the sun died,
as we made our champagne toast,
then took the southern stairs
to launch the ******* dark,
& leave kisses like postmarks
in little blooded pairs.
There is no second place
to your coup de grace.

Don't pull away,
my lovely dear.
It's Valentine's today,
so don't pull away,
but come and stay, say
you won't disappear.
Don't pull away,
my lovely dear.

Please, please, please
come down on our side.
I'll ditch this clovering snow,
& go anywhere with you.
Either way, our parade
will keep moving
down Main St.
I'm dying to tell you this,
but you're so far from me,
slipped into the black squares
of distance you requested.
I packed your things because
I couldn't take the museum:
your cherry lover's dress,
your little coffee mugs,
your Aleppo pepper.
Then I unpacked the pepper.
I love you without condition,
little tiramisu.
But I can't make you feel
the same way
without your help.  
Please come down
on our side, honey.
In our ship, right now
you are the captain
with the wheel in your hand.
I am the lookout -
I think I see land,
but there might be rocks.

Deleted from glass
by water greens,
I slake a gutter
of scotch.
Over the floats
of black holly
galaxies rip
like stockings.
Jealousies clump
in deathbed lanes,
sag across bedposts.
Swiped away,
I eat the dark of the hand.
Sleepless station,
thinned in the wash.

I made the perishing ride
to the hospital house,
sprays of sumac palling
the spring frame yard -
There were strangers at the table.

I stood my glass,
listened to the black-bagged speech
where the savage girl lobbed
against the terrible slack.
They carried him out.

You were a smeary bruise,
your eye hysterical,
cut from white twill
in the brumal March;
I slipped my blues,
to a blonde chorale
in your room, on the hill
gushing with larch.
We practiced slow,
while black cones bled
coffee. Your breath
came in little throws,
your heart in parcels of red,
that led to our little death.

Mickey and I rounded the house
to an orange pool wrestling
with an aluminum gloam,
deck chairs and log quarters
stacked in the yard spread
against the high house,
Maryland night bent through
the gate rings, and whiskey
seeds come toll.
After twenty beers,
I fell on my side,
retreated enough to throw up
alone, sedate rectangles
over speeding asphalt.
Dazed, I wandered inside
& found the girl
in the water heater room,
pink bra under bare bulb,
feasting on the joists.  
Mickey drove me back.
My sister was on the phone, laughing,
while I sat in the stitch of my room
waiting for an axe handle lullaby.

I was a winter's seventeen
as I stared out the window
of an old 91 Pontiac
at two in the morning
& saw the golden grass
churning the leaking dark
of the middle school meadow.
The moon died, was reborn
to a scaffold's womb.
We stayed up, but didn't speak.
Not even when we saw
amber hands gripping the field brow,
arranging the morning.
She started the car in the strip lot
& stole me home.

Memories hang
like windchimes in me,
knock darkly to each other -
I carry them with me,
ingots of loss,
stacked steams of grief.
All these memories,
clicking like x-rays -
I take you and gently
add you to them.

Oma watching
television downstairs,
while blue room sheets
squared back in peels,
& honeysuckle's ladder
up the brickwork
reached like spring fingers
towards my window,
where in brown shadows
I saw foxes steal over
the crumbling drive,
& clouds crashed trees
atop deer eating lawn
where uncle's autos coruscated
in the tall wilds.
In that bed I came of age
with thoughts of women naked -
New candles ached
and led the way deeper
as they dripped
all across my adolescence.
Years bloomed inside me,
stones fell from the sky,
hard as ***; fox bones
slept in the wood,
the televisions all sat,
idols on the lace,
flickering presses
that touched every wall.
The moon a wet thigh -
something sang,
& burrowed beneath the pillow.

I hold out my face
to the society of her gaze,
while a dusk erupts
to a three day blow,
& chapels of snow
jilt into soot knots
beneath a cruel
broadcloth dune.
I hold out my face -
but now to an absence.
Thousands of miles
sway in the poplars
before flying away,
away from me.

Her eyes, posts
of bare hazel clique,
survey me in this chair.
Her hair gathers in rude
thunderheads by the ear,
black about the field.
Her engraved mouth
is crowded with oblivion
and serendipity, beckons
a foreshortened hand
that warbles with filaments
of anticipation.
The aspect of her neck
brims with motion -
a swan on flat water
chases the smeared
crumbs of evening.
The beach of her *******,
her cheek, her blush bough brow,
Her knee, in repose,
sustains a milk leg - 
Her face, gathered 
to watercolor thought -
And behind it all, a mind
rejoicing in the sun-
O portrait, be glad
you have no memories -
with every new pair of eyes
you have a new lover,
a new lover, a new lover.

Frank takes another ****,
& ribbons of condos
emerge from the hills.
He leans into a rustle
of unwrapped rain,
waiting for it to slip off
so he can fly fish again
out at Michael's Mill.
He's been cooling heel
for hours, but he makes
a good point:
the river yields bluegill,
the kitchen table yields
bills come due.

Drinking four hours now
in a pool hall, Larkin folded
behind me as a I draw
back the cue. Distressed,
lines snap the stroke:
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Not tonight: clouds crawl
on sick bellies to an Alka-Seltzer moon.

But drink gone dead, without showing how
to meet tomorrow – is molded
perfectly to this blind drunk, thawing
beneath breezy transom, getting dressed
for a ride home after going for broke,
drinking anesthesia and losing all finesse
early in the binge, kindly corralled
by patient friends deaf to last call's croon.

Your hair is rich and dark,
but it's a mess, a bird's nest,
maybe a bit oily.
But as you boldly affirm,
you don't need tidiness,
or even beauty.
You fail to object when I throw
your little poem
to the floor on my way
to your body.

Belted star! Swing from the sea,
the gin is free, and we will drink out here
against the rail, needed company:
To my chagrin I’ve called her once again,
sleepless in Chicago’s restless drives.
She lets me know it’s not the night
to reconnect the nervous histories dreamed
between us in a single anxious twitch -
imperfect people love imperfectly.
Belted star, half-drunk on gin,
let's begin to count the countless
wraithly sheetings of the wind,
before I'm called inside by spills
of sotted laughter, and you're dimmed.

Years ago, we went down
to the wheat field, it was freezing,
& we idly plucked some burst chaff
before fumbling against a split rail,
the neighbors all watching
from kitchen windows,
let them watch, you said,
as you kissed me,
knees shaking in the yellow lake.

Drunk on Hirschorn lawn,
all the sculptures rise
& take to air, bronze over bronze.
She floats the cocked corner
of my eye, a wince under glint
of gangly windows glazed
blankly across glossy estate.
Drunk again at noon, drawn
in by hurt - she surprises
with reproval - though it spawns
first in the self-soul, first mourner
at the living funeral. O Jennie, minting
through this garden with cotton grace,
tolerate a dazed smile today, amid the statuary.

This poem will say nothing.
"Clouds snowed in the yard,"
and I record it here,
for reasons unknown even to myself.
The clouds have wine-dark pelts,
but that’s nothing new: skies are hard
to find new lines about. Poets fear
the cliché, try to enjamb around it – won’t help.
What is the jaggy cumulus mouthing
in the upper distance? Coagulating lard,
the snow meets salt, goes gray. Look up, peer
into that distance: skullish hills melt,
discolor into the hue of bruise or welt,
as if even the earth self-flagellates, regards
this day with self-loathing. I’ll change gears:
turned skyward like a telescope,
this poem said nothing.

Bone in the branch,
right on the face of it,
embedded symmetry.
Tillerman's lawn chain
in a dead leaf choker,
garbling the sway.
Maple skim dip,
a patch of buttresses,
pooling October.
Inert array,
flicking cardinals,
shoal's chaotic mural nose.
So many days like this day,
indistinguishable,
crushing.

Dr Weathers wakes
to a ridging howl,
frostbitten, snowblind,
stumbles rudely ahead
on cold black feet,
& hands that might
belong to another –
they went solid in the night.
He plows white weight
as if underwater, the sun
suppressed behind banks & steeps.
But the mountain also rejuvenates –
he is curiously younger,
an adolescent dismay
of being cut loose and held back,
both at once, as the wind steals
bellows from his teeth.  
And then younger still –
teetering march step,
speech blanches in the throat,
his thoughts mirror his needs.
Imagine what the lower guides see
as he arrives, his face
porcelain in the light -
venous glaze, stony veil.
Imagine his infantile thoughts
as they swaddle him,
so glad to be awake.

The mind is a constant quarry,
the scrabbled ore of thought
gathered to furnace maw,
deveined, burned out.
Birds wheel, hook, and flurry -
drop the ash seeds that brought
rubble to flourish. Dead rock and raw,
bad teeth in pit’s open mouth,
unwanted dross tells its story –
for every bar of artful iron wrought,
an equal amount is grossly flawed,
discarded, the earth’s wracking gout –
for each cathedral built, for every Gilgamesh,
there’s **** enough to grow a leafing ash.

Stout gulls shriek out
divorcing moments
as highways sag,
knocking margarita lights
one into the next.
Checkout is Sunday morning,
lobby as vacant as on arrival -
sign the check,
go through the motions.

The gaps go all quiet -
the Monday girl
glides brown cloud
down and away
while I walk winter rooms,
looking for a handhold.
Depression fills the mouth.
A whole childhood of rain
slants to snow.

You sleep in the beer garden,
while I find a choir
in a blooded cup.
Clouds interlock,
unearthly pinnacles.
You find bread, alka seltzer.
We compare fifteen year plans,
smiling shyly.

With irises black as limousines
you entered the grounds
without pronouncement.
You were like Baba Yaga,
cruel in your accidental truth.
Your achtung heart curled inward,
like a tar block, or amber.
With a pestle of love,
you ground me away.

Plastic sarcophagus aspect
of the breathing machine -
feed it broken foam
to make me free.
Paper sound lung,
a landscape of coral,  
tape the needle down -
we don't get many kids here.
My blood wandered
to another face -
my chest a kennel.
What's yours is
never wholly yours.

Soft as poached yolk,
nightlights dot the Liffey -
you are a snow dream
in a black gallery.

The fog loses purchase
on the window
and, dying, wicks
ashy vapor's slick scatter
to gated green-brown.
Morning comes again
in fractioned crooks
of snow declining
into fat eggs of rain.
The fog is a colossus,
ravels with dragging step,
before retiring itself
above oak branchlets.  
The sun wraps away
in gray, as if stolen.  
Nativity of cloud.
I'm telling you this:
everything is possible.

To E--,

Sleep flocks east,
leaving sheets clapped,
& yanking back
my unruly dream.
Frost is handsome
in the starry clover,
& an unsteady sun
seems still drunk,
flushed about the cheek,
after columns of Saturday.
I can feel the chill
across the glass
when holly stripes
with stringent wind -
I miss you.
You trouble my mornings
with your absence.
Sometimes when thoughts
are mottled by drowse,
I surprise myself
making coffee for two.
My walls rhyme
with your drawings.
I must wait until
your half of the bed
aligns heady bells again
on a snow-drum Sunday.
I remain,
your lamp-eyed lover,
Yours,
Evan

Flurries fall to green varnish,
grass-toothed jaw. By the time
coffee is ready, their lives
have waned down to water.

You say the same thing will happen
in Dublin tomorrow: Iveagh flake
mounting the park bench,
then deleted by the ineffable air.

Pink supernovas
call monarchs to crawl;
poison milk drops from
broken green breast.
Fields flicker with rivers
of afternoon latex.
O fluent wound,
this is a poor man's Lethe.
There are better ways
to forget what happened
than the annihilating
milkweed cripples.

"If I cannot bend the will of heaven,
I shall move hell."

Meadows of blood
are sluicing from my arm,

& courts of lithium
are bottled neatly.

This stream within me,
the red subliminal, latent,

needs beating back.
The noon sun kicks uselessly.

Something happened,
it had nothing to do with me,

it had nothing to do with
quiet cancerous woe,

nothing to do with the
underside of my mind.

I am quiet in the chair,
the blood-taker smiles at me

through alcohol bouquet,
compliments a yielding vein;

the blood pours and pours,
aching with subconscious.

The sun is loathe to rise.
Beige, bored,
morning crutches
to some kind of
vertical birth.
Your rain plinth
glissandos don't
quite make it here;
I get cerulean void.
When the sun
finally coughs up
a gray beam
over the bellies
of tenements,
I've moved on,
to the seethe
of your notice.

Little chips of evening
hang in air like
laundry on the line;
they bring to mind
the blue slot branch
dissolving in summer,
glimpsed from the roof,
or the way the metro
cascaded the station
in rippling silver armor,
or our little burial
under sterile spruce -
I remember you
in your dress of cherries,
your cola-tinted glasses
reflecting a gold hoof of sun
as you threw sway.
But now it's winter,
you're gone away,
the evening slithers
over battlements
& night wrenches in
with fists of crows,
the dollop of moon
clots by the back,
the heart sheds a skin.
Nothing's like it was
when you were here.

The cloud pulls apart,
a two-headed ripple
in a towering sepulcher
blue as a peacock.
I am a witness,
possibly the only one,
to this bright death.
This, then, is the memorial
of something that lived
as a waver in the upmost field
for just a few minutes,
slain by the unfaithful breeze.

Rude, infant cloud,
stamping east -
will you carry
something for me?
Bleachy lump, shroud,
linen's careless crease
in bloodless aerie,
trawl a lyric to quay.
White-headed, bowed
beneath high fleece,
insolent taffy, ferry
over salt-rutted sea:
Take them, these words -
before I ask the birds.

I walk in wild
liquor combs
of stag grass,
alleys of fat cubes,
all engraved with
a Cinderella moon
that bows out at midnight.
Under it all,
a grease of solitude:
it's just me, and
these things.
I watch one neighbor
collecting delivery
in the upper dusk.
Another falls
to mattress, in
a lonely window
all of yellow.
Lamps fluoresce,
streaming cruelly,
while cigarettes
float in the dark.
Where are you,
in this?
Thousands of miles
in the rain.