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.

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.

Hundreds of yesterdays erupt like starlings
from the papered heads of trees.

Pumpkin flesh scent on fingertips:
another happy hour come and gone,

flashing lips that meet and fold,
eyes like inverted tusks.

So I seep over the tile like wine
combed to froth by headstone teeth.

They all have hidden hearts
that swim in the lacking pool.

They all clench you close
& breathe your air,

trying to dig up the root
for their private pestles.

No - no! Never that.
I walk the night wood,

where hundreds of yesterdays
roost out of touch.

Sunset sloe,
candle sway,
cloud slip.
Night wants,
hush wish,
wedding will.
Paint away,
bedding bow,
arching hip.
Steam haunt,
gin dish,
hazel trill.
Irish love,
endless dove.

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.

Tell me I'm not here, alone -
that I've finally traded this broken meat
for vapor, a stock-share of memory
that wavers through the dusk screen
into a charry blued imbuement -

For a moment, I'm by the riverside
in Paris, eating bread and wine with her,
a small and stony autumnal Eden.
Now I'm dying in Saint-Eustache,
craning my neck into the god-vault...

O reader, I can't lie to you:
I am here alone, after all.
This blood-ended prison twitches
with memories of Les Halles
& Tiquetonne, and that's all.

Paris was, not is. What "is"?:
Medusa's severed head in a cake box;
an anchor of whisky nestling itself home
in the cold iodine of the soul;
my name dissolving into a beard of ash.

Blackly digging in the ten o'clock hour -
the rain already came and went -
the District is dying of moon-steam,
a summer that chokes even the princes of air.

I am mortally alone. My chaperone,
a brimming glass, turns a blind eye
to my piling thirst. Pylons of shadow
gather in the alley like barren trees.

My monstrous shirt clings to me,
accentuating the beer-pounds.
I pray for a swift end to this grit-grind,
a legacy of revolving abandonment.

Numb, dulled, I stare out at the sparse
traffic cleaving to the bitumen, red lights
& bare legs floating by in the wheeling hour,
tone poems of pale flesh and sad laughter.

This is very close to the bottom:
the scotch that scrapes my tongue clean,
the freshly washed glass, the beckoning bed
that promises only dead dreams,
                                                          pillows of sand.

The stars are out:
rhinestone belts
frozen mid-lash.

The wasp-wax sun
broke its last crutch,
sleeps behind the hill,

& the smeary bone-pocks
of moon are slouching
silently overhead.

We are inhabited by the dead.
They live inside us, smoking calmly,
like a recently fired gun.

The vapor is carving its way
toward the envenomed starlight,
yellowed drips, old waves.

This humid umbrella, pinpricked
with the soft vacillations,
briefly covers us both:

we huddle under the winding,
thousands of miles apart.
Your river laps against the stone,

my river floods the pine path.
We chat about lost cats.
Stars are dying despite our spells.

Flurries drop
into the river
just beyond
the Navy Yard.

The flakes divide
at first, but then
the air warms over
the dull marine chop

& they get thick
& woolly and just
stumble into gray
dough-castles.

Snowfall only drops
for a night or two
& then it waits for
entropic days.

We talk
late into
the street,
the trees
seem to
come loose
and drift
out into
the night sky.

In the farthest
distance,
galaxies
break apart
into strings
of stars.

You're in
Dublin,
lovely
in your step,
in your voice,
in the stocking
you rip
so idly.

I watch
people
stroll across
the broad
walk of
apricot
stones.

I watch
the dark
green sky
drop centuries
down the
Spanish steps.

I listen
as you
enchant
my phone
with sighs.

The world
is so small,
crossing
the bedposts
of the sun.

The world
is so large,
on the beach
of your
laughter.

I watch your legs -
not the denim or flesh,
but the long thigh bones

as they glide above the chevrons,
flourishes above the tile,
cursive scrawls in the wet air.

Strange thought, I know.
I cannot account for it.
My sister sends you regards

from New Jersey's Starland.
You smile with sweet tolerance.
Mezcal courses through my face.

Happy hour is ending,
& with it, my tenure in your kingdom.
I am cast adrift once again.

The moon is full tonight;
gravid, a white bursting.
It sings into the palms of my hands.

O bartender, bartender,
with your good posture:
who am I? Who am I?

My darling one,
here is your breeze.
I also send the sun,
my darling one,
and I'm not done:
here, have the Hyades.
My darling one,
here is your breeze.

How surreal -
the wind
rustled itself
into my hand
as I spoke
to the girl
across the sea.

She could
hear it
as it purred
in the cup
of my palm.
It followed
me for blocks,
voweled
& agitated.

But nothing
could tear
my ear
from the girl
and her laugh.

Here is the piercing sun,
its lean tongue carving us,
etching our unclouded skin.

Under the yellowed fingernails
I'm in the brew hall by the train,
missing my father.

Where are his memories?
When his liver folded away,
where did his thoughts go?

I hope he waits somewhere
in the yellow spurs of air
that radiate around us.

I must go -
my friend is waiting for me.
I walk down the canary *****

into midnight's arms,
gut full of fat blooded summer,
a fission of grief and understanding.

I.

Your fingers raking
through chestnut wreaths
gapped with gloss:
the wind mussed your hair

into a sudden wild shape,
& the canal was glowing
like a runaway filament
in the buttery dusk.

You had gone quiet inside,
months before.
You slipped a spider's lyric
under my tongue.

Summer was really winter,
& winter was a belt cinched
around a hopeful throat
crawling with clouds.

II.

I'm not good on my own.
I drink too much,
I have terrible dreams,
I don't move for hours, days.

Stars bleach me, pierce deep
into a plastic rib space.
Old friends get married,
get pregnant, go invisible.

I turn on the charm,
a smile pooling amid
the pink. Whisky
floating over two tongues...

Was I supposed to make a move?
I missed a cue, somewhere.
I feel my insides lurching
like sun-broken snow.

Tipsy on their Labor Day,
in rakia you're swimming.
Through hill's rooms you play,
tipsy on their Labor Day,
a heady plum bouquet,
glass waving, brimming,
tipsy on their Labor Day -
in rakia you're swimming.

Rolling mint
hillock
of Ashland,
estate of my
grandparents,
where I curled
dreams
into the blue
room's sheets.
Honeysuckle's
ladder up
the brickwork
reached like
spring fingers
towards
my window.

From brown
shadows I saw
foxes steal
over the
crumbling
drive. Clouds
crashed
into trees,
deer ate
lawn in
the evening,
uncle's autos
coruscating
in the tall
grass wilds.

In that bed
I came of
age with
thoughts
of women
naked -
Torches
of thought
ached and
led the way
deeper
& deeper
as they dripped
scalding tar
all across
my adolescence.

Years went by
inside me.
Stones fell
from the sky,
hard as ***.
Fox bones
slept
in the wood.
The television
sat like
an idol
on the lace,
a pressure
that touched
every wall.

The sun
a chorus.
The moon
a thigh.
Something wet
rustled in the
eye that
burrowed
beneath
the pillow.

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.

Something withers in the gut;
a light goes out. Air dribbles down,
down, settling in the soles of my feet.
I'm alone under the wing negative.

The seething mottle of clouds
brushes past, old bruisers.
I am trapped down here,
in the memory cycle that lurks
inside all the glassware.

Everything that came before
seems like it happened to someone else.
There is no after; slices of globe
are dappled by thoughts that get lost
in the salt-surf marrow. Rain claims
an errant soul with bolt-iron drops.

I dabble with shadows,
eating them like hors d'oeuvres,
but nothing's enough for the broad yawn pit.
A green altar sways in the vowelish breeze,
a light blinks on, but suffers back blank.
Imperfect things, loving imperfectly,
sweep down the road, thin as eyelashes.

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
          Heart

And in the late afternoon
I wanted to be a nightingale.
          Nightingale.

(Soul,
wear an orange color.
Soul,
wear the color of love)

In the living morning
I wanted to be myself.
          Heart.

And in the falling evening
I wanted to be my voice.
          Nightingale.

Soul,
wear orange!
Soul,
wear the color of love!

*

Cancioncilla del primer beso

En la mañana verde,
quería ser corazón.
Corazón.

Y en la tarde madura
quería ser ruiseñor.
Ruiseñor.

(Alma,
ponte color de naranja.
Alma,
ponte color de amor)

En la mañana viva,
yo quería ser yo.
Corazón.

Y en la tarde caída
quería ser mi voz.
Ruiseñor.

¡Alma,
ponte color naranja!
¡Alma,
ponte color de amor!


by Federico Garcia Lorca
translated to English by Evan Stephens

Froichd-uilinn - the second drink of the day, taken while propped up on your elbow

I sink my bones, crooked in mattress,
lower the liquor to lip as calving sun
leaks through the east-faced pane.

I think back to La Fontaine Sully
in La Marais, on the way back
from the graveyard...

But to what profit?
My memory slices me open,
revealing a slow web of star-gutted stairs.

"Immer augen" my grandmother says,
or said, or will say. The street slouches
with honey-feet, red wine drips into the river.

Fashionable diners spread themselves
across the sidewalk. Laughter launches
like stones into this tower window.

Old thoughts are a slaughter.
A marriage didn't happen.
Bright lights against the meat-black

of night, the shroud-cloth
over my own face, lips wet
& shining with liquor.

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.

"Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense."
-John Ashbery, Some Trees


After two tiring marriages,
& the women before and between,
she was olly olly oxen free:
come out don't hide it's safe.

Let me backtrack - I was four
& dad left, not too far, but...
far enough. I became, inside,
a two-headed monster of desire:

one me says go find love
grab it hold tight tight tighter;
a second me says wait watch be safe
they're already half out the door.

Feeling free, I gave too much,
or maybe needed same. Or both.
She left, and I was so haunted
I sold my house.

So now I just walk about,
**** an envious ear
at the young and ******
laughing into cut-glass nights.

I scry my sliding self in plate glass
reflections, surrounded by angels
on the hunt, letting the days
engrave their aches all across me.

The two-headed thing I was
is starved lean, fed only on sleep.
What now? This evening
the stars look laminated,

& streetlights hum and mumble
wolfishly over black triangles
of sweetened space where thoughts
hang like last year's ornaments.

Cool Hand Luke has permafrost eyes
as he smirks down the fiftieth egg.

Lawrence doesn't mind that it hurts,
holds up a match and blows out the sun.

Frank Booth huffs his gas, "now it's dark,"
& new parents replace the old ones.

The lights come up, the professor
steps to the lecture square, underneath

the once-flickering wall's altar wing,
& gathers thoughts like garden stems.

Some of us were baptized into celluloid,
we opened our eyes and were submerged

into a breathless 100 minute night,
a wilderness of grayscale myth.

Charles Foster Kane dies today in Xanadu:
his life shuffled for us, as if it means something.

There I am, in the cold glass:
looking back at my half-self.

Beyond me, my neighbors bundle
in and out of their kitchens,

parcel from bedroom to bathroom
in their sweatshirts, pajamas,

their old night clothes.
I just watch from a black shell

that fumes and blossoms
with hasty glasses of *****.

I sit in the dark because
there is no one who will visit -

I feel bones under the skin.
I feel how thin it all is.

I gave myself away for years, but
the lights are all snapped off now,

even the gaslights are turned off.
Streetlights rescind their beams.

My neighbors never look back out
into the street. Their eyes are flattened

with yesterdays and tomorrows.
Their yellow squares go low.

We, all of us, hear the song that slips
from the moon pocket, calls the frost.

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.

Most of the snow has melted now,
gray dough-banks ****** on curbs
under a wind-lacquered gloss.

The Thai salt sits in me, hours after,
stirs thru blue yarn veins,
sharp in the stomach's wax-pit.

Night declines when lamps snap on:
dead, reclusive salmon eyes that broadcast
onto the cold screens dotting the walk.

I haven't seen anyone for so many days -
my tongue is still as a lake skin.
Lost hearts voyage in whitened dunes

of all my yesterdays. The winter pattern
is so quiet. I am a crease in the fabric,
a black ache in the ruined prism.

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.

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 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.

"I am, in my condition, a prince"
-The Tempest, Act III, scene i

Hushed, hunched night -
with wet beaks of yellow,
cars cut cancerous flowers
into glass-skinned stores -

pornographic eyes spill and wave
from rolled faces rioting free
of the short-hour restaurants,
into leaves green as billiard felt.

The self-poisoners are out tonight,
their shouts like jaundiced fireworks.
A moon-breast hangs heavily
in a night thin as gauze.

Up on my mazurka hill,
far above the blistered river,
I consider my options.
I'm deep in the dying, but -

despite my condition -
a prince of bottle and verse.
Black gears, tongue-and-groove,
force the night forward.

Reader - I'm alone tonight -
consider this an open invitation.
The secret knock is this:
Three, then one, then two -

by this will I know it's you,
come to talk poetry long
into the whaling hours,
debating the merits of it all.

Bring nothing but your thoughts,
I have wine enough for us all,
& if the wine fails, I have scotch.
The words will carry us to morning.

Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
             tracks
             A memory
            Heavy as winter breathing
            in the snow
-Elise Cowen


A white cloud caul brooms back
from the blue jeans baby above,

& a lemon blotch veil settles
over a moss-pocked branch facet.

Slow and chilly the afternoon
peels into memory fingers -

pleasant and strange, like sugar
stuck under the tongue.

I audit odd thoughts:
ephemeral *** reflections

are gauzy in the middle distance,
trapped in a basin of lost things;

grief is colossal, a leviathan
washed in from yesterday

to blight the snubbed beach slant.
In between are a thousand thousand

blacknesses between starry points...
Speckled with desire, I am witness:

the blanching cloud caul is broken
& a day-head blooms from a glass.

I have
this
daydream
where
you are
drawing,
writing,
and I'm
composing
another
nocturne,
and the
nail of
sun
falls
& falls.

O,
your
talents...!
I sing
of them,
in this
lyric
and its
brothers
& sisters.

They are
gifts
that
wing
through
the alchemy
of your
blood.

I feel it,
too,
when the
music
must be
thrown
from my
fingers
or die
of rust.

I feel it
when
poems
climb
from the
garden
behind
my eyes.

I feel it
in you.
Darling,
draw for me,
draw for me.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

The market of sleep
   is full of false starts
& the gingery moon's
   just a pock-marked heap.

Down in the office
   there's a tunnel of nothing
& tongues are falling
   with heavy high profits.

Brown hair of fall
   blue legs of summer,
fumble the moment's
   drift-hearted crawl.

The night sky is only
   a black dead dough,
& late in the morning
   hands are so lonely.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

My skin, thin as foam
on the beer body...

Then it evaporates,
& something leaks out

from the valleys inside
into the ornate air:

some of them can feel it,
& watch me closely.

The bathroom graffiti
sings my name in choir.

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.

Open eyes and rise,
lope to the bath,
salt meridians on cheeks,
third day this December,
though no dreaming cries
whose bleach-paths
waken one weak
are remembered;
the night-face dries
and the aftermath
is grief's white speech,
a scrawl in slumber,
unmapped marks
a brush's lead-white arcs.

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?

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.

Dear Z----,

Once, maybe, I was an Orpheus -

one of millions (there are still millions),
calling someone back from an underworld -

once, maybe, I had candles for fingers,
stars leaking from my teeth,
eyes that broke barred doors in twain.

But not now. You were so shy
at the bar's short shoal
giving me rain-in-Montreal smiles,
hinting at a history of disappointment.

Sometimes, it all changes in a single night -
but the magic failed us both.
I will always wonder.

So I am sorry: my hands, my eyes...
my starry mouth a wide sorry-slash.

I have to go. -E

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind
which binds the passion.
-Thomas Aquinas

June sun wakes and slowly rakes
its brow, a lemon-clouded reach

that staggers broad-brushed fringe
& stumbles over tenement bustle

awash with sweat and coffee steam.
But under modest morning's facing

flower riots of desire:
bitten lips pout in open windows,

coarse, carnal hands glissando
over fruit in grocery bins,

a stranger's barking blossom laughter
a little too long and loud to be entirely proper...

Even here, where my lover tightens the knots
with one hand, shining scissors in the other.

Night's face
on the pane,
gin's lip slips,
a dark dress spills
into the grave
of unfinished speech.

Yet perfect thoughts
sputter down,
candied eyes
launder the late hour,
& embroidered shadows
of perfect length
& distance pour from
lye-bright lamp.

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.

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.

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.

A crust of wax
affixed with
breath hovers
near the window.

Doctors retreat
oh-so-quietly,
afraid to break
the soft blood
of this moment.

The hospital
sheets are so
impossibly thin,
like wafers,
& they shine
as a fluorescence
wanders through
the five of us.

My father
slowly assumes
the translucence
of memory.

I know it's over by
the stillness of his hand.

Kite-flying in late April
is new love:

You take a thin string and run
forward until wind comes

to cast it into the upper reaches,
climbing with new life.

You can try to reel it in,
but mostly it follows

unseen impulses.
You can cut the string

& let the clouds eat it,
or rein it back until

it protests against the hand,
& sometimes a branch will take it,

or another kite will cross,
& give you a new string to deal with...

But while it's aloft, how true,
how just is that small parcel against

the powdered square face of sky,
riding a breath into the free rising?

My hands are crooning,
those old songs of blood, love, and night.

I wrestle the angel on the riverside,
damp wings scraping my face

as I eat the halo whole.
Now I'm adrift, floating in the bone -

airplanes are bleeding white ether
in a lipstick sky, under a crumpled sun.

At midnight I watch the redhead
send glassy broadcasts to her stone flock:

she shoots mr sleek-hair in the attic
of the blue-house on the electric island.

These impressions storm through me...
nothing is narrative, nothing is coherent.

I was wrestling an angel in one moment,
the next my hands were crooning

sandy nocturnes of blood and night.
I lost my job and now I'm flying away.

There is a
bent blue hill,
a green pool,
a bleached heart.

Remember when
we saw Lucy,
in the checkered
room, that drowsy
drunk woman
leaning against
my back, singing
every word?

There is a
red elm blaze,
a white tooth,
a bleached heart.

Can't you feel
I'm trying to say it?
Look, I know
words are not
my bridges.
I feel them perish
between us.
Can't you see it
on my face?

There is a
gray brick crumble,
a yellow deadlight,
a bleached heart.

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.