The leaf drifts
to a green grave.

The soft run of sun
spreads red in the hand.

Angles descend
white into bronze.

Where are you?
You break my symmetry.

All these engravings
in a wing-wax afternoon

are hollow
in your persistent absence.

There won't be children,
     let's be honest -
after all,
     you're not coming back.
  
You and I've become
     ninety degree angles
& the months
     go crawling.

I'll mail it all
     to Dublin.
No reason to scream -
     leave it in your cup.

It was a fair shot
     for a while,
but sometimes grass
     just dies in the yard.

Alone in a folding
wing of sun again,
where Scotch passes lips
straight to an idling blood.
If you worried, don't -
I ate another day without you.

A club of sun
down Upshur St
breaks our talk
of pink noise.

Interrupted quilts
of cloud are shyly
unlaced in the stillness
of the afternoon.

I turn your face
toward the green
tunnel of park,
but you're not looking.

Walking down 12th
past old Providence Hospital
where years ago
my second wife

recovered from a seizure
she had while drinking beer
with the Peace Corp neighbors
on the fourth floor

past the Catholic group home
where Shannon lived
in a room that tasted
like old books, before

she showed me how
the energy was working
in the empty moments
that arched between us

past the bridge on Taylor
now covered in anemochory
at the foot of the
high rabbit hill

where Hilary pulled off
a grand seduction like
something from an opera
even the couch was guilty

past the old gym
near the law school
I biked there
at six in the morning

to throw water on sauna rocks,
eating the steam;
I swam away,
never to be seen again.

You came
from verdant Dublin
by word and by mouth.

Ancient sorceries
dealt the evenings
like playing cards.

Paintings stammered
strange truths from the walls
of the marbled gallery:

Yes: you travel with and without.
So walk slowly, dear,
in the cold rain of May.

Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.

I agree to reveal a secret
in a sonnet, Inez, my beautiful enemy;
but no matter how well I set it up,
it cannot be in the first quatrain.

Here, come to the second: I promise you
that the secret won't slip without my telling you;
but I'll be ******, Inez,
if eight lines of this sonnet haven't already gone.

See, Inez, how hard life is!
With the sonnet already in my mouth
and every last detail planned,

I counted each line and have found
that according to the rules by which a sonnet plays,
this sonnet, Inez, is already finished.

I have seen strange things, Celalba:
clouds wrecking, runaway winds,
high towers bent to kiss their foundations,
the earth vomiting its very bowels;

hard bridges breaking like tender reeds,
prodigious streams, violent rivers,
waded poorly even with cleverness,
mountains poorly bridled;

the days of Noah, people high
in the tallest of the pines,
the most robust and skyward.

Shepherds, dogs, huts and cattle,
I saw floating, without form or life,
but I feared nothing but my misery.

The last shadow will close my eyes
     and take the white day from me,
and unbind my soul from lies and flattery
     so that it can find its way;

but my soul won't leave its memory
     of love there on the shore where it burned:
the flame that swims cold waters
     and has no respect for the severest laws.

My soul, that a god made a prison for,
my veins, that have braided fire,
my marrow, which scorched in glory,

will leave this body but not this desire;
they will be ash, but that ash will feel.
They will be dust, but that dust will love.

Soft draft of moon
& rescinding cloudburst
over green-oiled yard:
April night.

Night, craftsman of lies,
crazy, imaginative, chimerical,
what do you show to the one
     who conquers the good in you?
the flat mountains and dry seas;

inhabitant of empty brains,
mechanic, philosopher, alchemist,
vile concealer, blind lynx,
afraid of your own echoes:

the shadow, the fear,
     the evil you are known by,
caring, poetic, sick, cold,
brave hands and fleeing feet.

Awake or asleep,
     half of my life belongs to you:
awake, I pay you with the day,
asleep, I don't feel what I live.

The past is always
my witness -
the beach-eating;
the stumbles of love;
the small birds chopping
their wings through
the hysterical greenness
of her rain yard;
the late night snow walk
to her house on Otis,
full of first mistakes;
the blinding braid of ink;
the endless column of
the unsaid.

They are sailing
at high tide,
the galleons.
As clouds break
on the pink
evening mantle,
and the wind
purses toward
the waists of trees,
the galleons reef
sails and draw off
into curtains of surf.

That was the day
you told me to meet you
by the split rail fence.
When I got there,
all I found were squares
of black grass
and a moon
as white as a lie.

Once, I thought
I had an empire,
full of ecstasies of grass,
temples to an obese sun,
words signed away
into the last corners
of the brickish night.

I had such grand plans,
to put death to death,
but soon all the heavens
of love coagulated.
Ghosts without eyelids
or lips followed me,
registering each sin.
An owl scratched at the moon.

This was the state you found me in -
I staggered around, alone,
scratching out my brutish art.
For you, though, I combed my soul
& yielded to the burning mercies
you offered among the knees of trees.
You cured me with sugar and patience;
I lived in your eyes.

I am your own poet, now,
lacing you into my middle age,
howling at this strange gamble
that closed a distance,
& falling into your arms
as often as possible.

You haven't moved
in several minutes,
a perfect model,
as if it were your goal.
The sun filters through
gauze and lace,
the peculiar mid-morning
light that muscles its way
across the wall
in grasping splashes.
Your tea is steaming
in its high-waisted glass,
& I hear half-sounds
escaping from your room.
I am the reporter
of your brown eye,
writing this moment
to you even though
it's already gone.

It is a night
of champagne and ashes.

Here is a glass
that never stops weeping,

singing your name
with a wheeling hunger.

I sit just nearby,
under yesterday's chandelier,

reaching your sleep
with all ten fingers.

Tonight I'm rioting
with your smile,

and my skin
is insane from wishing.

Tomorrow I will be satisfied
with your wanton eye,

and the clever flood
of your lip.

Green rapture of human life,
crazy hope, golden frenzy,
intricate unsleeping dream,
like dreams of vain treasure.

Soul of the world, demented lushness,
decrepit imaginary greenery,
the today of joyful expectations
and the unfortunate tomorrows.

Follow your shadow in search of your day,
those who with green glasses for cravings
see everything painted to their desire.

More cautious of my fortune,
I have both eyes, both hands,
and only see what I can touch.

I was young, my hair
    covered my forehead.
I picked flowers,
    played by the door.

You were riding
    a bamboo horse,
jousting with plums
    among the benches.

We lived in Changgan,
    without dislike or suspicion.
I became your wife at 14,
    I was shy and unsmiling,

I felt walled-in, and I refused
    every one of your calls.
But at 15, I found myself laughing.
    I even willed our ashes together.

Now I was drowning, even
    as I threw my eyes to you.
By 16, you had traveled
    through gorges filled with rivers.

I heard nothing for five months,
    and monkeys cried from the sky.
Your footsteps by the door
    slowly filled with moss

too thick to sweep, and leaves
    dash away in autumn winds.
In August, yellowed butterflies
    arrive in pairs to the salt grass.

It hurts my heart to watch it.
    I can feel myself aging.
But sooner or later you must descend
    back through the river gorge.

Please write before you do -
    I will come and meet you
all the way by
    Long Wind Beach.

You're sitting in profile
in your favorite red jacket.
Your one eye focuses
on maple pages,
a sweep of hair
recklessly dashes
across the water
of your brow.

When the connection drops,
you are frozen like that,
scalloped by shadow,
sleeveless purple shirt
drifting an eclipse
up your arm.

For a profile like that,
I would sell all of this...

Brandy in my blood,
thoughts riding across
the pink plain of my hand.
M Street confessions
come cheap this time
of year, when
cherry flowers tint
the air with their
exploding heads.

Her version of me
seems better than mine -
I'm always out in the distance
selling rain back to the clouds.
Spring's coarse branch
clubs the brownness
of my unspooling eye.

Is she second-guessing?
Who can blame her?
I have burned all
my wild dreams
into flakes and cinders.
My art is hungry,
a nest of grinding teeth.

Lancing sun
in a wilderness of
roiled stratus -
a day begins
under threat of rain.

A stalking heart
crawling the high grass
searches for you.

I've made hundreds of
searches for you,
crawling in the high grass,
a stalking heart
under threat of rain.

A day begins:
Roiled stratus
in a wilderness of
lancing sun.

Bad luck
to dream
of the living.

Air is gaunt
with memory -
& what might be
across the line?

Moon has died,
stuck there like
a split opal
or cream iris.

Mind is filled
with omens
& char marks
of worry.

To dream
of the living -
night-killer.

Tuesday night and
you've accepted
the proposal, yet
under the chandelier
of mistaken fireflies
you half-smile,

a drawn curtain
that I can read
enough to worry,
to feel
the body
move away.

The rest of the night
is a sharp nerve,
& gray fingers
of a fog slip
down the street,
thin and ashamed.

Blue sword of night,
red sword of morning,
yellow sword of afternoon.

The depressed machine
is full of sharp parts.
Who turned it on?
It's a trick question:
it was always on.

But it never rains
on the whole country
at once. Some glade
somewhere is shining -
beats of grass under
knots of sun.

My crest is laden
with mournful anchors:
each high is waited on,
politely, by a low.
Can you free me?
That, too, is a trick question.

Blue sword of night,
red sword of morning,
yellow sword of afternoon.

I am wayward,
have always been.
Yet I'm one sleep
away from you,

& I'm still:
still as the night leaf,
still as the larch post.
still as the new moon.

Here is the pool
of evening,
come to take this
waiting from me.

I am wayward,
have always been -
but for you, lovely one,
I am patient as saints.

You're gone again -
what should I expect?

The day breaks
& the flowers
are frozen
like enamel.

The morning shrug
of sun eats
my resolve entirely.

But what do I expect?
Your life is other steps
& I'm sentimental
if I think otherwise.

What do I need
from you?

I'll step back -
unsustained,
unfulfilled,
but patient.

Laces of rain
sleep in the air
as our speech
erodes into slopes
of silence.
My phone
doesn't ring.
Your ghost
walks the wood
floors tonight.
I watch from
the frost light
of the fridge
as you vanish.
Nothing's left now
but to close the door,
sew the dark in
around me,
& listen to the
last movements
of the rain.

Clouds in ginger
crowd the skin
& months grow out
while I become
an eschewing hermit
who rerolls nights.
Over in your
farther morning,
flight TK 1977
is sleeking to Dublin
on the same
bronzy sun that
sings in brick.

I've felt far
from you, lately -
distance deepens
in the swaying spaces
between your words.
Splitting goodnights
with a lonely axe,
I let my mind
run away with me.
Please, be here soon -
the moon is but
a sobbing blotch,
& the grass is dying
in its bed.

The night is filling up
with white wine and
other people's laughter,
but you are asleep,
moon-touched.
Can you hear the sea,
from your corner
windows, lapping
the stonework until
it's faceless?
Can you catch
that brief scent
of snow, before
the clouds dive?

No matter if you can't.
I send this
to tell you
what you are -
a flash of truth.

Thorning sun
over all of this
sweet yolk
& rain: the impression
of you mixes
with the violent
bouquets of etched air
that rise past
my velvet knee.

Buying wine,
one hand holds
ten dollars
while the other
clasps the glass letter
you floated to me.
I leave the moon
alone. The memories
are fencing sabers
anyway.

Valentine's:
a cup of wine
I raise in toast
to your bobbed hair.

There is a line
from me to you.
It straddles
the salt **** of sea,
the starry marrow
of night air,
the pencil shavings
about your ankles.
It threads through
castles of romance
I built in another time,
the courtyard littered
with lost scarves.
The line spans
thousands of girdled
miles without effort,
yet it touches you
questioningly,
and lays down
like a stray cat.
Go ahead,
it's yours,
take it.

The falsetto
"no no no"
shot down
the steepled
maple *****
into the walking line
by the metro.

How someone
got up there
we never knew, or
what made them yell.

I remember only
that the sky
was littered
with the wrecks
of clouds, and
it was a Friday
in winter.

We all stopped,
though we
saw nothing,
& then
it was over.

The grass
waved away
the watery
minutes,
& the sun
rolled loose
among the wrecks
in the blue ditch.

So we towered
over red tile
on the metro
platform,
hands heavy
with phones,
until the train
obliterated us
with its urgency.

Went to the
therapist drunk,
a blonde Wednesday
of rain corsets,
redding leaves,
cloud dough.
I remember the
syrupped anger,
distilled from
child's blood,
dripping on the
therapist's shoes.

Late afternoon
floating avenue,
apology of grass,
little pushes.
She was waiting
in the shaking
shadow.
This time
I had some kind
of self-regard.

You are
so far:
if I tell you
that small green
throbs of ice have
formed night
colonies in the
fir needles,

& that horns
wail car to car,
crying out
for you,
"Where did you go?"

you'll just have
to believe
my reports.

But when
I turn off
this lamp,
and the shadow
snaps from
my hand,
up across
the wall
into the dark -

love,
when you rise
this morning,
that sweet shadow
that slips through
your teeth
was mine.

Orange buttons
of repetitive sun
crush up against
thin folded dresses
of blued cloud:
You send me
earnest self-portraits
& my cantilevered
eye is oh-so-yours.

The sunset strides
one more chestnut
step, and I remember
how you laughed
when your shirt
parted for my
tickling hand:
even the moon
was up on its toes
hoping to see
the bright heave
& glow of your skin.

They could seed
the clouds
with silver
in the high distance
until the sky,
hard and shining,
sent lacing rain
to drop at each
of our feet, 5,214
miles apart.

Miles of sea floor
& mountain back
sleep between us.
Miles of birds,
miles of laundry
on the line.
Miles of great aunts
smoking cigarettes
on the stairs,
miles of mice
slipping through
high grass.

If it seems far,
close your eyes,
because miles
drop quickly
in the dark;
you proved this
to me long ago.

They could seed
the clouds with
silver, but they won't -
instead I seed your
eye with this lyric
until it rains
inside you.

Black crash
pillow's face,
twilled to
the old nightmare.

Ironic that
the child who
spent years
fighting
the father
who left,
the mother
who curled,
ended up
divorcing
year after year.

This night
shone with
shedded
skin. I
walked away.
The moon
was pregnant
with an
airless sea.

I woke from
all of this
feeling like
a wreck
that might
be saved
by you,

but the miles
between us
argue so
persuasively.

To E--,

The orange sky
at 9 pm
is thrown over
the streetlamps,
bursting the
starry seams.

It's like you're
here, sometimes,
on this couch
the color of
burnt grass,
looking back
past the gauze
into the
hinging face
of night.

In truth,
you're sleeping
at the crux
of two
continents,
in an
eight-hour wash.

Every night
violent dreams
find me out
& unsew me
a little bit.

But soon
my wing of sleep
will be clean again,
because you will
be returned to me.
The orange sky
at 9 pm will
stop revolting,
and the night
will again be
the sweetest
of burdens.

Always Yours,
E---

Go, visit home -
but come back to me.
To Europe's end you roam:
go, visit home,
my little honeycomb,
and be free.
Go, visit home -
but come back to me.

"We three, we're all alone,
   [...] living in a memory,
   [...] my echo, my shadow and me."


Over in the corner
are your books,
stacked into the wall.
I like to be the mourner,
it seems. Long looks
at your bric-a-brac, at all
the things you left.
The night is perfectly cleft
into darkness and silence.

What else can I do,
but poison myself
with sentiment?

My mother's friend,
bleak-mouthed,
took me to St Matthews
in cinder glory
& kept her eye
on the thin gold leaf
spread across colonies
of saint's faces.

No, I'll never forget
sitting in the blue car
with my mother
when she told me
Eileen's brother
had killed their parents.

Eileen moved
to Bristol
& got married.
She made calls
that rattled my mother,
sent fruitcakes long
distance.

When my father died,
she couldn't stop herself
from insulting him;
my mother forgave.

A year later,
she died swimming -
my mother's mind
leaned back fifty years
& remembered someone.

I...
I remember only
St. Matthews,
the way the windows
below the azure dome
hissed with light,
& how Eileen -
indifferent to religion -
explained the rules
of the candles
for the dead.

Where are you?
They buried you
in a sleep in the air
so I must mourn you
everywhere;
even with this poem,
this cenotaph,
this memorial
to the notches
you left inside
your son.

Laces even
as sutures
carry midnight miles
at the black river,
the broken-backed
streets of Georgetown,
a silent yard
of snow roses.

The anvil of night
just stops there,
& the chandelier
of air tightens
slight as wire.
Vaults of cold
ache in their arches,
as back windows
broadcast lives
vaguely beyond
fraying wreathes
of fog.

This is a city
of runners.
Thousands
cut open
the moment
& burn flight
onto the winter weave.
Skin is song.
The heart cants
forward, leaning
into the fallaway.
Always forward,
always forward,
runners sing -
there is nowhere
else to go.

The new stars
keep roving
& the roads rill out
down the hills -
I am so lucky
that you smiled
at my wayward
life, let me
open your grace
with a strum
of my fingers.
I loved you first,
and best - just ask
the wild nets
of new stars -
they'll tell you
everything.

Green-stroked leaf
over lapis door
with four panels -
black vinyl
perches shining,
a motorcycle,
a motorcycle.

It enters her eye,
the day's spillway
laid down
to beige page.
Color and form,
thrown from her hand,
thrown from her hand.

I often wonder
if maybe I am
the only man
in Washington
calling his lover
in Istanbul.

These poems shriek
through the air,
shaking the line,
coursing through
systems of white,
silent satellites,
breath in the valleys
of our hands.

So when I tell you
that I love you,
the words fill
all the spaces
of the world
before they are
presented to you
on your page
of glass.

Bold girl's
gold curls?
Cold whorls.

Brunette's
new bet?
Fool's debt.

But dark hair
sparks rare -
marks pair.

My gravid eye
opens a gaze
on you,
strafes under
grayling cloud,
attaches to a memory
& bites into the
blue-green night
with cigarette teeth.

Then you leave,
skipping across
the undone
waters who calve
cities that split
like onions. Whiskey
beads on your fingers
in the wood-dark bar.

Lover, how you
braid my blood...
Your plural beauty
rests on the elbows
of Istanbul, and
in the same moment
it arrives here,
a splitting whisper
in winter's pavilion.
I crave the crisp
pear of your voice,
the sail's spurt
of your body,
the quiet galleries
of your soul.

So return quickly,
I'm lost in
the night streets
without you.

"Wine is the mirror of the mind."

The cut glass
fluorescence
of sloe gin and *****,
cuffed to my wrist,
scours the tabletop
with self-cruel smiles.

In the convex glass
I'm wearing
a robe of pills.
In the convex glass
my hand's curve
strangles a joy
back down to size
with forced sleep.

Dizzy on the bird's
chop-wing of couch,
half-tapped glasses
lose the day to the
little white discs
laboring to lift me
roughly into the spaces
between the stars.

The octagonal glass
is so empty.