The clouds are entrails
full of meals of sun.
There has been a petite
****** between us,
but I've forgiven it -
the heart is water.
That could be a lie;
the scalpel's slit is finer
as I sit here,
the ideal patient,
staring at a street
scrubbed with wind.
Please, never read this.

An incomplete face
in its glass slab,
pulls a distance over me.
Mournful, I watch the neighbors
streaming down the toothy walk
in black and brown coats,
their laundry massed  
on shoulder tilt,
or in little onion cart.
They are all right here,
in this winter identity.
Washington accepts them.
If they should crane
& launch a coup d'œil
into this hunched pane
they'll know I am not of them;  
what body I have
stalls on this laminate -
the black fume
behind fastened eye
has already bolted
to keels of poetry
across furrowed Atlantic:
completing a glass face.

O tunnel of firs,
tied with rain,
were you watching too,
when my parapet
ate a hock of indigo
at seven, and, still hungry,
gobbled a dull star?
Were you watching
from cold roots,
little grove, when
something unfaithful
happened? A curling lip
received a sacrament
of apple cider vinegar
under clouds of hospital gauze.
O firs, you never tell me anything,
too proud by half in your
gowns of needles.  
That's alright - I'll lay until
the night slips over the line,
and imagine a kind of morning
where I have nothing to tell you either.

Your name is scrawled
in the sun this morning,
& the lilies are bursting
from their green fists -
new shadows croon
from bedsheet tents,
& tiny kites of frost
play telephone lines
under teacup cumulus:
the world is your empire,
even the white lawn
flaming with winter
under the death's head
evergreen is yours now.
My suitcase eyes
will make delivery
before coffee is served.

Prepare well,
honey bird,
but don't dwell -
prepare well
for a spell
answering words.
Prepare well,
honey bird.

Push back black bath of sleep;
I have these 3 am shakes.
I hear the water skin
moving in the next room,
drops of cotton coil to cold leg,
& salt lamp cracks on,
pink broadcast against the hour.
Dreams retreat on the board;
the moon swims in the frost.
Where are you?

Join me beneath
an eight percent moon
that shook itself free
from Irish holly
on its way to
bearded stone.
Agent of itself,
it little cares what
we'll do here,
in this rose garden
of shadow flighting.
Join me in the sliver
of tinnish light
that wanes into the berries,
& shove your breath
into mine with clear intent.
We wear dresses of silence.
The mottling dark
clenches your hair.
A faceless statue
chaperones no one.

"I'm in love,"
so I shrink the world
down to a fatality,
something you could
wring out with *******.
The atlas makes scrape sounds
as Europe folds in half;
North America offers
nothing but slippery pulp.
This green touches that green -
if only distance were like this,
reduced like a wine sauce,
Washington sidling to Dublin
like old friends at the bar,
while collapsed Atlantic
makes a blue U shape,
bent.

The white flowers
will not arrive
by stallion, nor
by lightning.

The stolid courier
will knock, a door
swinging; a suitable
place prepared.

In the cold district,
the exploded heads
of trees look back at me:
why didn't I save them?

Even the sun seems lopped.
But in the face of it
I will stand, have coffee,
& be reminded of you.

It's 6:30, and the sky
turns a spoiled milk shade
before tripping
in its hurry to arrive.

Embers stinging the clouds,
soot settling on a line -

black flake rain
is stirring.

Here is a new sleep,
where I find myself.

Laying in the cascade,
the phone's young flood

assembles your hair -
I'm reminded of my flight

across the salt,
to the place where you are.

This city's graved flecks
are forgotten; I've left them

for a green kingdom
in another pattern.

Blue dregs are hanging
each to each on the line,  

& ash tendons pull
as cirrus takes the stair.

Overflowing night is emptied
in the twine of our sleep,

& we wake, suspended
in our own eye.

There is a silver splash
perched in the bathroom

where the hand finds itself
encased in breath,

a throwaway gesture that drifts
over to the new corner,

& finds shape as your face,
shielded in cloud.

I am staring out
at the black shoulder
that fell an hour ago
across the yard lap,
thinking about it again:
that love is a game
with no way to win;
but you can lose more slowly.

I watch the small birds
chop across caroled glen,
bunch split on branch,
push through bitter yard.

In this way I have missed you,
stirring myself thing to thing
in the same small spaces -
finding only thinness to rest on.

Honeycombs of light
****** themselves into being
in metro fields.
Children cross the lush
to skip stones at the dead fence
as night assembles itself
into spaces and stars.

Day falls away like a skin,
beneath conquering belts of milk
that separate from a lidless emptiness.
Silver subway trains gleam
in their charcoal tunnels.
Apart from all of it
is a chalk morsel moon.

Sometimes you are
the thrown stone
sinking down to post
& sometimes you are
the star wheeling off tether.

Language ends here -
in the hazel of her,
in uncountable sleeps,
in a bundling of sun,
in a resonance,
a stray violin.

Look, up in the clouds
full of black horizontals;
a night is born

in little dawdles,
in brown day bank gasps,
earliest stars bowling to break.

I am here, with you, under it;
planning to grant you
the little pictures

that you so desire.
This chapter belongs
to us; to us.

Look, left of the moon,
by the rain steeples;
a night is born.

Mortal pink to gray crest -
the fox sun and cloud hedge
advance thin as wax,
strew frost on the yard,
& wrist peach away,
as light leaks, hours ahead.

Some yellow has gone,
bleeding in the valley.

Night lisps forward,
soft as ether,

as blossoms of bay laurel.
The moon stains the east,

& errant glimmers
founder in the cloud ditches.

The trees gather ice,
pages of silence,

smeared with identity.
Let this winter end

with an escape -
let this blood gallop

from black lots filled
with daggers of self.

Move me to
the necklace of river -

away from this inheritance
that stirs the dark.

The old light of the stars
is brittle to breaking
under tonight's deserted curve.
My thoughts slur away...

Wishes wheel out
over the tree line
while radio eyes
hush to the dial.

Cars keep their grip
on the dying street -
my thoughts fracture...
I'm telling you - it still hurts.

Go for a walk
in the unbroken
Saturday, the trees
sling themselves
at the upper blue,
the ash wall rustles
and the russet fawn noses
the cherry branch snarl.

A stillness about the hands,
near where the wasp
was singing. A stillness
on your side of the world,
where the new stars
are out roaming again.
A stillness broken when
the wind strums us
with its wild comb of fingers.

In January, sleep packed
its suitcase and left out the window.

I patrolled the rooms,
waiting for it to return.

I became friends
with the **** tin moon,

I found leaves of tears
inside pillow cases,

I sat with a flowering aloe.
Nothing brought sleep back,

not even the song I found
along my body in the broken bath,

not the poems that dripped
from my fingers after washing

with charcoal, not even
the green prayer of the couch.  

It was only when I rejected sleep
that it returned with laughter in its hand.

The heater lopes
behind me, so
I don't hear you
rugging your way
up the stairs
with your gun.

When you point
it towards me,
the lights switched
on yesterday.

I followed him
step for step
for eighteen blocks.
He vanished
into a pool hall
called Pop's.
When he came out,
I was waiting for him
with a hand full of

The following is an account of
expenses in connection
with the Underwood investigation.

Expense account item #1:
$24, cab fare to your office.
Case of Jane Underwood,

Seattle, not seen
the last eight days.
Insurance policy on

her: $10 million.
I took the case.
I cocked my hat

low over my eyes,
cigarette behind the ear.
Expense account item #2:

$322.74, airfare to Seattle.
I interviewed the family,
the friends, the husband -

they all had alibis -
& also the man
she was seeing on the sly.

Expense account item #3:
$33.08, two packs of cigarettes,
a pack of gum, and a beer

at the neighborhood bar
where I watched Jake Wilson -
the Other Man in the picture.

Expense account item #4:
$29.90, cab fare from the hospital
where Wilson just gave it up.

I found him folded under
a neon sign by a cheap hotel.
I didn't see where the shots came from.

Someone wants Underwood
the stay missing, very missing.
Expense account item #5:

$120, a new coat, the old one
has bullet holes. More close calls.
Digging around, I learn

Wilson was knee deep
in counterfeiting Franklins.
Crowbar to the basement door

of the house he was renting
under a different name,
I found the missing woman,

cuffed to a radiator, mostly fine.
She found out about the funny money,
threatened to go to the cops

unless Wilson cut her in.
She was over her head.
But then - so was I -

who shot Wilson?
Expense account item #6:
$75, marriage license, King County.

Jane Underwood and I are
running away together
with the bad hundreds.

Time to end one of these
stories the easy way.
Tired of Hartford,

tired of heart's noir,
consider me retired.
But then, holding her hand

driving to Los Angeles,
her purse falls open
& the gun that killed Wilson

falls into the footwell.
It was all a setup. It always is.
Her hand gets cold, tight,

real tight. The ride
is about to get... difficult.
If only she knew, if only she knew

how many times I'd seen this
twist, how many women,
how many guns, how many

Wilsons had fallen to the ground
under how many cheap
blinking blue broken neon signs.

You're sleeping in,
little dove.
Let the day begin
with sleeping in -
It's no sin,
my love.
You're sleeping in,
little dove.

Today I walked wet streets
strangely sheeted with pennies,

as slant light burnished coil after coil
of hair outside red-***** Macy's,

& the wind pulled open the liquor
doors in the middle of the block.

I missed her as I crossed the blank
green language of grass,

I missed her as I slipped through iron
railings into rain's only face,

I missed her as I hailed the bus on E st
& drifted into a shining glitch.

I lipped a Gauloises and observed
the body of smoke being born.

Then, just before this poem ended,
night appeared in my pocket,

next to the leather and the money,
& it was so hungry, so lonely.

I sheathed the sharpness of my eyes
in pity, and missed her all the more.

Little magpie,
don't leave bed -
stay the day instead.
I have coffee, bread -
we'll be fed -
but that thigh
must elude this eye
or I lose the thread.
Did I hear you sigh?
Little magpie,
don't leave bed.

You know me by now...
I catch you
with messy hair
under the new face
of night, smiling
miles into the workings
of my eyes,
& I'm all undone.

You're lip smoking
as we walk canal south,
the whited angles
of swan wings
tenting the water
beside your laughter.

You know me by now...
your fleet kiss is blown
across a blue broadness
that could never stop it,
never,
          never.

You know me
almost accidentally.
But when the night blows out
& the little secret garden
is filled with small rain,
it's your eyes I want
looking for me.

White tongue of ginger,
black tongue of coffee,
& morning limps in
at 6 a.m., hiding between
the pages of blue books.
I'm under a memorial,
across five meridians,
fifty-five hundred kilometers.
My hands hope to drift
under the knit peach,
& I love you with both lips.
White tongue of lemon,
black tongue of cardamom.

It fell below
freezing today.
They say it might snow.

My morning is slow,
I saw sun's only ray
as it fell below

the black blow
of cloud's spray;
it might snow,

a flaking flow
gray on gray,
bringing me low,

as though
it knows you're away.
They say it might snow

like crumbles of dough
dropping my way;
sinking, falling below; 
it might snow.

Christmas drifts by
under insensate stars,
under a blue scarf
of evening, under
some ether, under
risers of smoke.

Yellow Spot is poured,
& moments begin
to skip away
into the fallaway rain.
Christmas is red fingernails
and a green sweater.

Christmas freights along
in shovels and palms.
It walks the streets.
It drops into parks, silently.
It sips its Yellow Spot,
or something like that.

They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.

Soon, the bars will all close.
Soon, the restaurants will empty.

Yet this wild archery lawn,
these elephant bones,

this wild strawberry tree,
these rose benches where

we ate our bread and wine -
they will carry on.

Ten days green
in the quarantine,

as the numbers
combed upwards,

always upwards,
enough to make one

invoke Jeffers.
Sitting beside you

at spring tide
at Sandymount -

the sea will carry on.
The canal face,

blushed with swan,
it, too, will carry on.

And now you and I,
on the sunken patio,

in ruined deck chairs
sitting and watching

the sun splash in -
carrying on.

Where is your body
when you text me?

In the searching dark
of the bedroom, where

the drunks and gulls
bear cries against the window?

On the riverwalk
when the clouded gray

syrup leaks through
onto the water face?

By the fresh red trees?
The third floor coffee?

The archery garden,
near the strawberry tree?

I will tell you, darling,
that my hands are busy

filling these lines
3379 miles and 5 hours west

of your river city -
but I wish they were busy,

following the lines of your nape,
your shoulder, your smile.

I am somewhere between
your waiting eye and
the slatish sky that
breaks away easy from
the office of rain that
withholds half a world.

I am something between
the passion of Yeats and
your passionate wait,
given to me across
the five hour sea,
full of firsts.

A branching chime curls
into a hanging chain
of grayish rain.
The neighbors extinguish
all their yellows,
placing the winter
back in a black relief.
I'm leaving tomorrow,
off into the marrow
of the world, to see her,
to step into the unwritten;
nothing can slow me -
on my way to the quay
I'll throw over a river.

Thinking of you -
the night caress,
the black lip flower,
the water hall.

Sleep won't come -
only the quiet wait
until the soft white
hoof of morning.

But I'll mail these
little ponds of thought
to your bed, in case
it softens your eye.

Oranges don't grow in the sea;
there is no love in Seville.
Brunette, what a light of fire.
Lend me your umbrella.

I wear my green jealousy
like lemon and lime juice,
and your words,
your sinful little words,
they will swim around.

Oranges don't grow in the sea,
oh love!
There is no love in Seville.


Adelina de Paseo

La mar no tiene naranjas.
ni Sevilla tiene amor.
Morena, qué luz de fuego.
Préstame tu quitasol.

Me pondrá la cara verde,
zumo de lima y limón,
tus palabras, pececillos,
nadarán alrededor.

La mar no tiene naranjas.
Ay, amor.
Ni Sevilla tiene amor!

The cat makes her bed
as constitutions of sleep
overcome her.
The day peels back
in pieces like an orange
revealing the sweet
flesh of sleep.
In the weave of day,
the cat finds a bed
in an old leather chair,
triples of sleep.

Lay a shadow on me -
we sleep overlapped
with the night-bells,
the thieves in the pines,
the crescent wine,
mothers-of-pearl.

Lay a shadow on me -
your sun's waist
rises while my dreams
are still marching
across my forehead.

I say your name
over and over,
spiced petals
of a sea rose.

The moon has already plunged
into the alley by my window,
& the stars are scraping away
with milky fingers.

It's a night for names.
I find them on green walls,
in cups of green wine,
across greenish clouds.

I say your name
over and over,
like collecting sea roses
with both hands.

The lowest pine branch
bows its head just above  
where we buried our names
on that day in May.

The air was sweet
with anise, and the wind
through the pine boughs
sounded like the sea.

I want to dig up our names,
I want to push aside
the needled thigh of pine
& bite ***** into mulch.

I want to remember
that day in May
when we buried our histories
in a drum of gelato.

The stars all come out at once,
like whipping a sheet off a bed.

A crowd of silver
floats in the moon's broth,

& approaching apples of light
break away from the black hoof,

the flooding vein,
ten thousand irises.

I was thinking of you,
watching green oxide stone
resist the rain
on a broken Sunday
when the groins of trees
trembled in the breeze,
& the sky lacked
all confidence,
five days until
the metal snout
carried me off,
away from a dawn yard
of bread brick, and
towards the one-wing bridge
& your greenest wave.

The sun sluices in -
the light just won't
stop breaking.
Birds are weeping
in trees full of dawn,
& poets run to the streets
to scribble out a heart.
The sun pulls away
from a neck of night.

I stand here,
cut from flight,
shaped by love.
You hold branches
of mulled wine
by the black milk river.
The blue and gold
of your soul
nestles in the sleep
of my eye.

The moon
is an anise thigh,
a frostling,
a silver galleon
with trimmed sail.

You are two hours
farther down the arc,
in a mountain-head,
in a waltz-walk,
in a sunroom
that the moon
has colonized.

Oh, the moon...
anise eye,
snow-wreath,
starched breast
aboard a silver galleon.

The moon comes double,
with a necklace of river.
It sighs and sighs
in black flakes of rain.

Red trees give us
mouthfuls of nocturnes,
like doves whistling
from the roof.

O cyclopean sun,
mounting and diving
the broad chamber,
blue over blind,
yellow rhyme,
lambent cirrus-stained eye...
I walk your heart.