In the Wednesday sun
crossing Farragut Square
beside a beautiful woman
of half-developed feelings,
there is a temptation
to forget thirty-eight years
of women just like her.

All my romances
are desperate tries
to close the old voids
that my family seeded in me.
Love me,
accept me,
stay,
please stay,
just stay,
I will take anything,
be any shape,
anything you like.

I loved women
one to the next
a wreath of sincerity.
I was always astonished
when it fell apart.

In the Wednesday sun
I am depressed.
I say goodbye
to my blonde friend,
and I curl up inside
like paper burning.

Like burning marshmallow,
the clouds this Monday.
Thumb over the phone
& the words to you pop
& sway like gin pink
with bitters. Lily lady,

O my lily lady,
kiss me marshmallow -
sticky and tinted pink
with lip on a rainy Monday.
Green window pops
arrive on my phone,

this sweet black phone
that brings you, my lady,
over Atlantic's salt pop
& volted marshmallow.
So on this Monday
when the sky draws pink,

& clouds too are toasted pink,
I take this thin phone
and find you. On this Monday,
my Dublin lady,
under a melting marshmallow
sky, I seek out your hot pop,

that flame that's popping
in the twilight, red and pink.
Sweet as marshmallow,
you burn through my phone,
my smiling lily lady,
even on a Monday.

& so this Monday
like a soap bubble pops.
I'm inspired, my lady,
by the silken pink
thing. On your phone,
a swan's wing of marshmallow.

Yes - Monday's poem comes pink,
& pops with phone messages
from my lady, soft as marshmallows.

The clock was set back,
and now night rots
away the afternoon.
Gray light spills,
slouches, sloughs
into my hair,
my hands, across
all these strangers.

Ovals of alcohol
keep the rain away.
My life is moving
stave by stave.
I used to go to school,
have a social circle,
idle through hobbies,
new days, new days.
What the hell happened?

You live on the canal,
by the little swan
that whittles the sun.
A sudden rush of clouds,
a clatter of sandals -
caprice of Dublin.

I knew of Dublin
and its grand canal
from old books tan as sandals.
I read Yeats for a swan,
Joyce for castle clouds
that yielded little sun.

But you, you were the sun!
You lit green Dublin
from within. Clouds
fled from the canals
of your eye. "Swansies."
And summer's far sandals

were today's sandals:
time shifted in the sun,
took flight like the night swan
through ancient Dublin.
You sent letters from the canal,
letters that divided clouds,

only to calve new clouds.
I've never worn sandals,
not ever, but when the canal
danced in my dreams, the sun
pierced my foot in Dublin.
You were my swan,

my elegant swansie,
killer of cloud,
conquistador of Dublin
in gladiatorial sandal,
herald and avatar of sun,
romantic of the grand canal.

Let me taste unclouded sun -  
let sandals upend the canal -
send swans by the dozen into Dublin.

It flickered in the air,
sagged branch to branch,
pushed against the windows:
a death was pulsing.

It spilled into the streets
of my hometown.
I opened an old phonebook,
the names were humming.

I was cut to pieces by it.
I knew her as a little girl,  
she knew my sister
in her hippie period.

The telephone lines cowered
beneath the gray massing of moon.
The faces of houses screamed
ceaselessly at me as I drove.

It is so insistent,
her sixth-grade smile
in my old class photo.
It hovers inside me.

Silver-sided rattle,
a humble streak climbing
the hill in small doses.
Blue teardrop seats,
steel and yellow poles,
broad-eyed windows that offer
the view of things that the subway
will never give.

I've seen fistfights,
a baby born, overdoses,
old women falling asleep,
old men screaming wordlessly,
junkies scrambling for pills
dropped underfoot,
tourists grappling with the geometry
of this unknown language,
all of it.

Vibrating with a menacing stumble,
it attracts everyone. It promises
a view and a destination.
It's better to go through the world
than to sink below it.

No phone call tonight.
The sick moon
coughs a cloud -
like a gray stain
on its face -
& I watch
as the new cloud
falls through the night
like a guillotine.

Sick moon,
thin and waxing,
my chest is
a curving hurt too.
Twisted and torqued
by the old carving forks
from the Thanksgivings
where red wine
sat screaming, and
polished plates
were also moons,
hard and silent
and empty.

No phone call now,
the breakup is done.
I shed my skin and salt it.

No phone call now,
only vagrant silence.
The sick moon breathes
a scrape of cloud
down the quiet
spine of night.

I painted some poppies a year ago,
long-headed, red as the watery sun
that floats in the Bay at evening.
A girl I knew asked for the painting,
and I said yes, it was hers.
Then her silence gulped months away
in great raw swallows.
One day my phone shook in my hand,
and the girl who wanted poppies was there.

By then I was alone, in an abyss,
so I was ready to answer a voice
that drifted down in flurries.
She sang jazz across the city
into my pressed left ear,
and I opened to her
like a drawer full of old knives.

I tried to embrace it
but it wasn't two weeks
until I was in bed,
staring at the wall
where the poppies hung,
long-headed,
red as the watery sun
drowning in the Bay.

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.

Anger soaks the room abruptly,
I'm thinking of you.
Cleaning out my black bag
I find my tarot deck, waiting
in its green tin tomb.
I shuffle and deal across
the face of one of the paintings
I've been working on,
a red face scratched out.

The brown lid of night
hinges closed hard,
and lamps take up the slack
with yellow spittings.
I draw the Tower,
the Ten of Swords,
the Hermit.
Past, present, future tenses,
all corrupted.

But who's surprised?
I derailed it all myself.
Only the cat,
the palette knife,
and the lonely guitar
bring life to days
made thin with the grim
solipsism of therapy,
intolerable solitude,
and the conviction
that I am unsuited
for all of it anyway.

Of course, sometimes
the depression rots away
back into the sickly loam
where it first bloomed.
It's replaced by the mocking
low-key mania that howls
half-hopes, that each throb
like a throated singing bowl
combined with the profane
drone of an air conditioner.

In those moments,
things get done.
Bills get paid.
I reach out to other people,
breach the indifferent yawn
I feel between each of us.
I splurge, scrape a stool
up to a bar, borrow
an acquaintance for an hour,
or else drink hard liquor alone
until my teeth sing and drown.

The airport
bar in Boston,
I'm sway
drunk
& holding
my glass as
if it's liquid
gravity.

She sits
next to me,
technically.
But she's
drifting away
like Orion into
unreachable
courts of evening.

Its a hard thing
to live with
someone who
loves you
less and less.
Rooms are
always empty
& loneliness
settles like
ash on the soul.

The heart
passes sentence
against itself.
Guilt's rapier
parries any
kindness.

Sometimes
I was desperate
and clawed
my way through
acres of gin.
It never
ended well.

But at that
airport bar
I first heard
a voice calling
from under the
scattered waves of
the alcohol sea
inside me.

It told me
the truth:
her love was
guttering
like a candle
whose wax
is fleeing
across the table.

We who went into the 4 a.m. of the world
regretting nothing but an unfinished song.

We who were murdered in the darkest lanes
and at the corner of the street.

I was much further out than you thought,
starless and fatherless, a dark water -

rescue me from this ocean.
In this part of the story I am the one who

changes minute by minute.
Beauty is the sole business of poetry -

I go on loving you like water but
every night fire breaks out from windows in Üsküdar.

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.

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 steeple tree is always falling
today in the wood your hand
the flower walk and the
long east of it, the last one
Trish the bar four pints
distress bit lip call
Yes, I know it's, Yes
taffy-pink sky, orange stripe
leaning up, it stutters
hers, the place is, evenfall
& the bird-perch pole
wipe the hair slowly across
bare and my skin a garment
No, it's ok, I'm ok
a tightness gathering
"heaven blotted region."

The girl from Dublin
comes to me here
under the the summer sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She drinks her new city
a cup at a time,
until her coffee is done.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I love her early
in the curtain of morning,
where the red trains run.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

She has wild light
under her step
when she walks or she runs.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

I wait each day
in an old black chair
until we can be one.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

The girl from Dublin
waits for me here
under the summing sun.

   Her beauty is soft
   as the day-ghosted moon,
   & never outdone.

Her beauty is soft
as the day-ghosted moon,
& never outdone.

It's snowing
tonight,
and I think
******* Dad,
when Maryland
beats Indiana
and I move
to text him.

He's beyond
snow now.
So what do I do
with these
unbearable photos
he took of me
standing alone
in the withered sun
on monumental trains,
I was six or seven,
out by the
rusting roundhouse
in Brunswick?

It's been snowing
for hours
& I carve
a footpath
out to the
unplowed street
to watch the
shining gray
banks under
the amber light.

There is no
route to carve
through this silence.
My father
was built
from ghost towns,
from Manzanar,
from the endless
pine-dark
of Idaho's
rivered night,
from all the
unmapped places,
he grew complete
in himself.

And even now
as I watch
the snow slant
and stumble
I am left behind
as his son
apart from him
& without.

The snow dives
into the
night blankness
& I wonder
if I had died
first, cutting
short this reckless
careless crooked
sprawl, would he
be writing here?

The smeared
gray glow
of the screen
across his hands,
the fat flake
snow rising
like dough
beneath the windows?

On my eleventh birthday
Dad gave me this book -
The Eyes of the Killer Robot.
Inside the peach cover was
gothic baseball,
malevolent wizardry,
small breath horror, and
magic, cut with 1950s science.

In the book a madman
learns how to extract our eyes
and uses them to power
an evil golem ace.

This morning, twenty-seven years later,
in the pre-Christmas rain
that pools black in the brick
I suddenly wondered
if Dad with his incurable
glaucoma his eye drops
and surgeries, realized he'd given me
a book about the fears of stolen eyesight.

And the son came to know
what the father knew:
the terrible softness
of a trembling eye
under the blooming
steel of the speculum.

The first thing that happens
is the world collapses.
That is, it reduces down
but only I seem to notice.
Everything becomes flatter,
the depth stripped away
like rotted lumber,
like when they gut a building
but leave the historic facade,
and I feel like I'm limping
postcard to postcard
until eventually like I'm peering
into a discarded diorama,
where everything is smaller
than it should be,
the crudest copy of itself, and
everything is bounded
by shoebox limits
I can sense them everywhere.

The second thing that happens
is that I avoid everyone.
I avoid my mother on Christmas,
I can't look my therapist in her eye,
I cancel a date because
I can't handle the contact.
I touch my skin and it's like
touching paper that's been creased
hundreds of times -
old pulp that frays and splits.

The third thing that happens
is that I lose interest.
I put in whatever minimums
the day requires
and not a scratch more.
I put my mail aside
and watch crows
gather on the branch,
facing the valley,
black eye to black eye,
base wings folded against
the sleek unbearable body.

The last thing that happens
is that life cheapens.
It's hard not to notice,
since the papers and the news
and everybody's phone
blasts forth the parade of death.
No one is spared, children,
animals, the happy, the hale.
And soon these thoughts -
that life ends without reason,
that God has retreated from the world,
that no step is worthwhile -
begin to bleed in my head.
They lead to the paralysis
of a patient wrapped in gauze,
leaving only the eyes free to move
and notice the great black wing
that scythes into the valley,
feathers dark as stout,
the sun setting in its usual
incompetent way, the wing
so graceful that it might be
the only beautiful thing,
falling out of sight,
into nothingness,
down the *****
into the stale dusk,
into the exact center
of a limitless depression.

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.

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.

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.

You're off the plane
back in Istanbul,
where your heart
was made. Now, at night,
it seems a little peculiar
this time.

But you've got all the time
in the world. The plane
is long gone for some peculiar
destination, while Istanbul
belongs only to you tonight,
you can explore its heart...

Yes, tell me all about that heart
and about all the times
you walked out into the night
and looked up at the trails of planes
flying far above the lights of Istanbul -
They must have said it was peculiar,

to want to leave on one. Or not peculiar,
maybe it felt natural, easy in the heart,
a readiness to leave old Istanbul
and embrace someplace else this time,
to climb aboard the waiting plane
and fly off into the night.

When you land, it's still night -
isn't that peculiar?
The plane disappears
and it's just you and your heart
this time.
Say goodbye to Istanbul -

So many places aren't Istanbul,
all of them under the night
of drowsy stars and slow time.
It's rather peculiar
how the heart
is faster than any plane.

But this time, love, you're in Istanbul.
I watched your plane cruise the night.
It's peculiar how my heart hurts.

In the dream
I'm a child
in a car
waiting for
someone to
come back.

I wait for
some time.
I climb the
seats, feel
the leather
between my
fingers,
roll down
the windows,
play with
the orange
float of the
cigarette
lighter.

But no one
comes. I realize
that it's raining
leaves and bits
of brick.
The world is
bottomlessly
vacant. I'm not
even sure who
I'm waiting for.
I curl up into my
favorite jacket.

I know it's about
abandonment.
My veins fill with
ampersands,
my eyes with
the ace of clubs.
I can feel my
breath blowing out
like a chandelier
of pain for just
a moment.

Then I pull it
together under
the dangling
jellyfish of stars,
to see what else
sleep has up
its sleeve.

Here I am
in the deep curve
of the pavement's push
toward salt-bleached ends.

There is a stillness
within my ear
so that I only hear
my hanging breath,
wreathes of frost
like smoke rings
in the dried sub-zero.

Snow is coming,
probably the usual
Mid-Atlantic dusting,
though it falls fat
like the soap flakes
that I poured
from a box
when I was
a child.

I distrust quiet.
I need noise
& music
& voice
to still my inner self.
It reminds me
over and over
I don't belong,
I don't belong.
Snow dulls the world,
wakens the mind.

The late night thoughts
are far the worst.
They part me out
like a side of meat
under the butcher.
I lay on the bed,
the cat kneading my gut,
& I think yes, go ahead,
turn me inside out.

The snow comes
as an ambush,
though you could almost
sense it, vaguely.  
The traffic slows
until only
the city trucks pass,
with the rattle
of rock salt
which skitters like dice
across the face of the street.

No more passersby
under the yellowed blush
of the streetlight.
Windows of the neighboring
buildings are closed
against the buckling gusts
of wind so cold it hurts.

Nothing left against the snow
except myself.
When the mind begins
its thoughtful treason,
& advances the first pawns
in a despairing game,
I have no good defenses.

Open the window,
catch the scent of snow
over the world,
& feel attuned
to the many pieces
of the clouds,
that fall and fall
until they vanish forever.

The
Dublin
strand
is papered
in wind,
my old
book
renewed
into
romance.
I love her.

Pen
scratches
the
whole
page
black,
& variant
sprawls
of my
name
repeat
until I
own a
house.

Sister
& I
in dad's
old car
head
up to
Petworth,
& walk
back
under
a sky
that
rolls
& folds,
a bolt
of cloth.

Break
new trees
on the
prison
island,
handcuffs
of ivy,
jump
the fence
& escape
to the
highway.

In
Georgetown,
lush reeds
wave from
the canal
bottom,
easting
in the
chartreuse.

Then cross
to Dupont,
thronged
with
day-enders
and students
shifting
from
coffee to
*****
as the
hour rises.

Scheherazade
cancels,
but I make
the best
of it,
writing at
the bar
next to
the girl
in leatherette.

The day
ends
with me
fighting
the pharmacy
of my
sleepy
blood
while I
break
the bed
I always
hated
and
throw it
into the
orange.

Day's done.
Another
year to
come.
Thinking
of her -
sleep.

There were
those thickets
of flat
graying trees
and a frozen
skin of lake
out by the
hunched rink
behind Georgian Woods
the terrace apartments
where Dad lived
after he left
the family.

Left to my
own devices
while Dad
delved in books
I slipped out
the sliding door
through
the frost-grass
and the
snow branch gap
into the
unfolding stillness
of the drowsing park.
Sometimes
my sister
was there
with me
in the woods,
our play
always some form
of running away.

In the early
years Dad
smoked a pipe
his thick
blue rug scented
with Captain Black
**** tobacco,
the white tin
with the rigged
ship logo.
The humming silo
of the air purifier
Dad's concession
to my convulsing
asthmatic chest,
close-gathered lung

like the branch bark
that scraped
my lip
as I ran in
the park wood,
blood slipping
across my face
and down
into the ache.

The worries
come on the walk
back, melting
together like ice
in the glass:
I'm missing
something,
& what pieces
remain
are broken,
& that I am
never in control
of it.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

No, you don't
see a thing,
I'm sealed,
a sarcophagus,
a remote satellite,
the flood
is put away
as neatly as
a magazine
on the newstand.

I make another
oath, to pry
open the tomb,
to speak with
a mouth
like a glen,
to accept
that I am not
my parents
nor the drift
of their silence.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

She reads by candle
in the little kitchen
by the rain-licked window,
pushing against a dark
that's black as pepper,
black as the merlot bottle.

It's empty, the bottle,
neck used for candles.
As for the pepper,
it spread across the kitchen
in the quasi-dark,
when she opened the window.

No - that window
is a lie. So is the bottle,
& the rest. I tried the dark
against the candle,
in the mind's kitchen,
got stuck on pepper.

Let's try again: pepper
falls like snow in the dark
when I'm in the kitchen
making dinner, bottles
open for tasting, candles
lit against the coming dark...

Much better. Seal this dark,
speckled with salt and pepper,
with the soft wax of candles.
Open the window,
tilt the bottle,
dance in the kitchen,

the new kitchen -
feel the call of the dark -
drink from the same bottle,
Burgundy earthy as pepper,
close the windows
& touch me with the candle.

I drink from the bottle in the black kitchen,
ignoring the cold candle in the dark.
There's pepper blowing out the window.

Detroit dropped away
after the big band wedding,
where The Sheik of Araby
climbed the hot pine hall
& the two of us killed
a bottle of Laphroaig
that we bought by the church
from the bulletproof glass man.

The next day,
she got the call -
he had died
in her room.
The marriage
began to sag
at that exact moment -
something failed,
something failed,
something closed
that never reopened.
I was alone
breathing
her desperate air,
her secrets almost
off the tongue,
almost vulnerable,
but left unshared,
carried alone,
held away from me -
I found it out the hard way.

I still feel it,
the green empire
of the reception night
punctuated by her
lipsticked cigarettes,
& the trumpets calling
both of us back inside
for last call.

Were they always a metaphor
for depression?

The green women
living always in the
ice-sluggish river,
waiting with thorn
teeth for those who
don't know better than
to approach their world?

Postpartum mothers who
pull the children back
into the quiet womb?

Every river seems
to have one:
Jenny Greenteeth,
Peg Powler,
Nelly Longarms.

Step out of the water, Jenny -
shake off the cold, cut your
hair, your nails. Toast some
cheese and bread, drink cider.
I won't ask you to smile,
or promise to save you,
but maybe just sitting
on the bench is enough
to keep your feet dry.

I was speaking
the words
that divorced her
sometime long ago.
The words
were less
than air,
& multiplied
like bacteria.

Some version
of them happened
again in a
cell phone
& again,
years later,
in another mouth,
while I watched
& again, again
came the words.

I gave them
my absence
too many times.
Now I sit alone
with a Scotch
on the rocks
inviting
the repetitive eagle.

The floor howled
in the last
lazy binge
of bronzy sun
before I broke free
to go running
the two miles
to the hospital
in Georgetown
where Dad was.

As I ran, I thought of
The Wreck
of the Old 97
which played on
the car radio
when Dad
drove us back
from the
Charles Town
racetrack
where I kept losing
the same $20
while Dad
placed exactas
and trifectas
to win
dinner money.

Turn it up
turn it up and listen
as the Old 97
engine over-coaled
and waving
with heat
races beyond rule
a bright streak
down the hill
down, always down.

The Icarus myth -
the father disappears
while the son melts
in the exploding face
of a memory.

My heart is tabletop -
the rest of me is the filled-in border
of jigsaw pieces, hanging teeth
around a maw; the middle is missing.

I am also the beheading bluejay
slicing the tendons of greenery
that waver in the rain lens
imprinting on glass and shadow.

I wait on street corners
for specks of truth, beauty;
"That is all ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know" and all that.

But I have a quicksand heart -
step and drown.
Wreathes of blood shiver inside
in murderous curtains.

I vanish in front of you:
This world has no middle in it,
& what little remains is draining out,
teeth strewn in a garden.

I remember you
& that rebel C
of blonde hair
by your ear.

You let me
tuck it back,
even after you knew
I liked you.

You were fourteen
& your world
was engraved
in italics.

When I cut myself
for reasons
I couldn't speak to,
you understood.

We were exiles -
but I always had
the impression
you found me

too safe to date.
Oh, how you were wrong -
an irony, for
you spared yourself

the wild hurt
of my terrible soul,
& the wrecked self
I gave so many others,

for when I said
"I love you,"
I always meant
something else entirely.

I started thinking back on you
as early as college,
glassy well of gin
weeping for me in my hand.

Years after that,
my brakeless bicycle
invited me into a bath of sun
& you were waiting there

as a thought.
I remember
being so divided by you.
My longings

were only ever half
about the blue
of your eye,
& that blonde C

I turned it back so I could
touch you by the ear -
a gesture you always allowed.
Mercy? Desire?

I never knew.
The other half was new,
a movement inside me,
learning how

to be in love,
a fourteen-year-old's
grand, hopeless romance.
I was reminded of this

that July 4th a decade ago
when I saw you here
in my city,
with your husband.

You still held
skeleton keys
that opened
my older locks.

Your intelligence
canted over me
& erased
almost fifteen years

& my chest was smoke
& my skin was a sky
& just as before, half was love
& half was not.

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.

Green on green
          scrape
add copper
          scrape
add blue
          blend
               scrape
     blend
          scrape.

No matter how hard
you carve at the pigment
with the long flat knife,
the canvas tooth retains
the wraith-stain imprint
of the older image.

Slouch the rounds
of doctor
and therapist,
hands on my knees
in waiting room
chairs. My eyes
have trouble
meeting their eyes
and I become
an expert
in rugs and corners,
in traffic patterns.

A new drug comes,
and I take it
like communion,
holy water
from the tap,
wafer in
a blister pack.
It takes a week
to crenelate
the blood, until
the smoking mirror
in my mind
is cleared.
I exorcise
the patterns
of night thought
with bell book
and candle
that come
thirty to a bottle.

Every night
St George and
his red cross flag
wields a lance
of lithium salt
against a
perpetual shadow,
a piece of my brain
that flickers
and hisses
like the dead
channels that lay
between the shows
on my childhood
television.

I will make us coffee,
& you will make us tea -
in leaves and grounds
our fortunes found,
& and what is meant to be.

A mouse broke its bones
on my neighbor's floor;
I was called in mercy,
as the angel of slaughter.
My heart was the water
in which it drowned.
Days later, the wound
closed when I met Circe:
my silverish lion's stony
fringe burned away in smolder.
I left her starry thigh,
her eyes like cask strength rye;
They live, we sleep - No,
we're awake, and the night is slow.

White noise is falling
from the treetops again.
I'm looking for a new apartment,
touring the giants
up and down 16th Street,
wondering if I'll cry here too
across the ancient parquet,
& who I'll bring home
to share coffee and deep jags
of insufficiency, feelings
I should not have shared.

Everything is eventually
unspoken, everything is.
Keep the heart off the sleeve
for a change. Hideaway
in the dull bronze candle
of winter city sunset,
gently tarnished with old snow.
Pause on the high Taft bridge,
despite the height,
and drop the heart away.

It's a lie,
I couldn't do it.
The heart sticks
in the hand.

In the bathroom at work
cheap dime-store razor
blunt as a wood-axe
plowing my beard
of coarse Sicilian hair,
a surprising amount gray.

Men from other offices
wandering through, eyes
that click judgment
while they wring their paws
under a tepid sink:
well, *******, I think,
who's holding the razor?

Maybe they object
to the blood that spots
the buff-colored basin,
though I'm careful
to push it down the drain,
streaking the porcelain
like a peppermint candy.

Captive of the mirror,
prisoner of myself,
radiant with anger,
razor in my pocket,
blood on my face.

The garden is filled with gods
and beggars and dull, fat cubes
that gather rain.
A bronzed angelic family nods,
weighted neck-joints, tubes
of browning flames.
Arrested drama, perpetual frown,
wrestlers mid-lock,
eyes into the sky.
I can relate, my luck's down,
girlfriend's gone, I'm stuck
to my skin, lonely.
Easy to imagine the appeal
of the museum garden life,
to be appreciated and secure,
with a fat cube friend's repeal
of flat love, a new bronze knife
to cut into the meat, to cure.

You're in hell,
a fractioned
ghost, eating
clay and dust.
You suppose
time moves
in this abyss
but there's no
way to be sure.

Then:
a scream
at the gates
like all the
winds that
scrape at
the heart.
& it doesn't
take long
before the screams
resolve to a name:
Ishtar is here.

She of ***, war,
& the moon, all
of them long
absent in
this place.
She wants in,
to rule this
forsaken empire,
to take it from
her older sister,
to conquer
one more thing.

She fails,
of course.
Her sister
tricks her,
leaves her
naked,
without her
powers,
after the
final gate.
Ishtar howls,
and leaves
to eat men
like easy grain.

But imagine
that brief
moment,
when you
think that
maybe, just
maybe, you'd
see the organza
ball of moon
again, that
you and the one
next to you
might embrace
in shaded lust,
engender
a new empire
in the dark,
& overthrow it all.

Hold on to
your hope:
Ishtar has
never been
patient.

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.

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.

Dearest E--,

"For she had eyes
and chose me"

I send
you a
small
lyric.

You
have
always
deserved
it.

“But I will wear
my heart upon my sleeve”

I take
this
play
& fit it
to my
need
this
Sunday,

my heart
a cuff,
shaking
with
morning,
affixed
with
a storm.

“I would not put a thief
in my mouth
to steal my brains.”

Your
voice
plays
among
my teeth,
& soon
my
thoughts
are your
rings,
Lorca's
green.

“Men should be
what they seem.”

"Our bodies are our gardens
to the which our wills are gardeners.”

My past,
with all
of its
attempts,
is as
naked
to you
as this
vein
that flees
my wrist.

In the
glass
you can
see me
whenever
you
choose,
even
though
my hair
waves
the
wrong
way
& my
olive
skin
dawns
with
ardor.

"To you I am bound
for life and education"

You
have the
scratch-map
to adventure -
you
journeyed
deep -
whereas
I spent
a life
burning,
'a trail
for the
devil to
erase.'

You are
a beam
let into
the rooms
of night.

I am
bound
like a
sailor
to the
mast.  

"Each second
stood heir
to the first"

Time
sips
from
each
glass,
moving
down
the line.

I miss
you,

Ever Yours,
Evan

The
past -
the five
of swords.

"Destruction,
reversal,
infamy,
loss."

I pulled
at the
stars
for
years.
I left
rooms
with
my hand
over
my face.
I counted
clotted
clouds
& wondered
which
was mine -
but none
were.

The
present -
the wheel
of fortune.

"Destiny,
fortune,
success,
felicity."

We are
parted
only
by
miles
coated
with
sea.
In every
other
way we
belong
to each
other.

The
future -
nine of
pentacles.

"Success,
safety,
accomplishment,
discernment."

I­n small
weeks
you
will be
here

& the
Italian
woman
on the
card

with her
hooded
hawk,

vineyard
pregnant
with
topaz,

& gown
of roses

will
close this
prophecy
with
a smile
& a sigh.

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.

I read that
courting words
are sweet
as honey.

No,
courting words
are breaths
held long -
courting words
are labyrinths
of nettles.