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 squares of afternoon
crawl like beetles over the hills.

The wake is through the twig-rush
rising left of silver; I drop Mom

off at the door, park in the back
by an iron whale-mouthed trailer

where the extra chairs are pulled.
Above tightened black ties

old faces float and smile grimly.
Mom braces against the catafalque,

"he doesn't look like himself."
**** gives the speech, carries us all

through the expected meadows.
One cousin is glassy after downing shots

but his brother speaks for both.
Afterward, Mom can't walk well

so I get the sedan and take her home.
Slashes of slick sun wend through

the canopy like blood dripped
into beer - streaming out,

red threads entwining, suspended,
as the whole drink gets darker.

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.

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.

My hands of old snow
are pulling down drafts
of brick-blooded sloe.

The TV's glass glow
is hard as a haft
in my hands of old snow.

Night thick as a dough,
bleeding moon like a shaft
of brick-blooded sloe.

Slip the man what I owe
in black dollars that laughed
in my hands of old snow.

Face bright from the blow,
a drunkard's witchcraft
of brick-blooded sloe.

This tired old show
again autographed
with hands of old snow,
of brick-blooded sloe.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Curious things emerge
from this last cup of gin.
Maybe I've been too alone
with the rain and with drink
because strangers converge
into thumb-smudged skins
washing over smoothed stone
into the storm's glottal rink...
I'll stop there and stem
these mannequin thoughts
seeded by a dollar's solitude,
watered by a fallen hem
of night. Thunder's brought
a brand new mood...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wild and kind, sweet-eyed,
you opened the drawer

& chose the long knife,
the anesthetic. Your hand,

it's so steady in the slicing,
unbothered by the steaming rib

or the hot pulp heart.
You've done this before,

you don't even leave a scar:
so careful, so careful.

Though you could if you wanted.
Yes, that's an invitation,

if you weren't sure:
cut this deep milk skin

& find my ruinous ache,
exchange it for your name.

Your smile is sharp enough,
your fingers are experienced.

You in that paper dress...
Ah - it's too late -

the theater is going dark.
The elms are sick with shadow.

The thigh of sleep
is whispering to you:

Go now, little surgeon:
you're done this delving.

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.

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep


Birds in flock are tilting
in the pink gloam,

a black convex wine stain
pouring from the last orange faces

of exhausted trees, flayed
by the new freeze.

My oldest friend smokes menthols
in the driveway, discussing

the crushing vicissitudes
of the women we have loved,

until voices thicken
into mint-smoke plumes.

Night is a coarse dough
come November:

knotted, knitted, clay-skinned.
These gaps between us all

are so lonesome. You expect
the silence to eventually contract,

but it doesn't; it won't.
Birds are slanting so heavily,

as if they are drunk.
"Dead men are heavier

than broken hearts."
They slip away, so that

the only sound is wind,
crawling up the hillside.

Each pushing beat
is a kind of fall,
a low broken drum
in the hot dark hall
where the heart
is the size of a fist.

Red clouds skirt
over unlit streets
where the moon splits
like a rotten peach,
crowded in
a low black patch
of night-angles.

Again I'm in the same
unhappy plot,
dropping away from myself,
stiffening into one
whose mouth
is a voiceless half-slash
that a ***** fingernail
might etch
in a grit of clay.

Broken machine logic:
if alone, then woman.
If woman, then alone.
The tape is cut too close to the reel.
The night is too close,
& the reel is spinning:
watch the heart
in trembling skin.

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.

Be with me, love,
tomorrow's our day.
Like hand in glove
be with me, love.
My little dove,
my lily bouquet -
be with me, love,
tomorrow's our day

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.

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?

Ghosts splash about
on the ice house wall,
beer chitters in the jar,
stories are told in fits and gnarls.

The moon is a bleached breast
in its brassiere of dappled smoke,
up above the cracked wet wire
in the driftwood garden curl.

In a slant, we all watch
a woman across the alley
in her blue dress, scanning
her hands for news of the heart.

In the near square, a thin man
is also a plume, standing shirtless
on his crystal wash of balcony.
The street sings: sea static.

All these people walk blithely by
as rain and steam take turns
on the roulette wheel.
I feel the weight of my interior,

I feel the limit of skin, the world
that ends there. I'm not sure
I belong here at the gathered table:
I'm a reflected photo negative.

Leaves spiral overhead
as the green-bedded steps
rise up in blotches to meet me.  
Loaves of clouds hunt and burst.

Whatever is behind me
presses me forward;
but whatever is ahead
pushes me back.