Blue dregs are hanging
each to each on the line,  

& ash tendons pull
as cirrus takes the stair.

Overflowing night is emptied
in the twine of our sleep,

& we wake, suspended
in our own eye.

There is a silver splash
perched in the bathroom

where the hand finds itself
encased in breath,

a throwaway gesture that drifts
over to the new corner,

& finds shape as your face,
shielded in cloud.

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.

Our thoughts float with gin,
and a little beer.
O darling, let's begin -
our thoughts float with gin,
and soon we're grin to grin
& the night floods with cheer.
Our thoughts float with gin,
and a little beer.

I watch the flash of their eyes,
the inhabitants of this mansion
who sometimes hear the rats
rushing downward in the walls.

Perhaps they pause for a moment.
Perhaps they have an upsetting second.
But they make their way back to the bar cart
& pour another grocery store *****.

Then there are those of us, my reader,
who step into the dark below the basement,
into the hewn room with the odd altar
covered in very old stains...

There are even those among us
who find the unfortunate stair
that leads down into the bleak bowels
where subconscious reigns,

where the sins of the father
are visited upon the children,
where faces are married to the pit,
where you can only stumble forward

until, at least, you reach the black lake.
Looking down, having eaten yourself
with a red smile and the knives of love,
you see your own face in the still water.

I'm hanging above
a checkered floor,
Lucy's on the other side
singing La Vie En Rose.

I wonder for a moment
if I could love you
into loving me,
but let's face it:

it's never worked before.
When she hits Night Shift
and I think how the lines
knock me out one by one

I just let go.
I shift against the bar
and serve as
my own self-prophet:

"I'll tell you when
I'm dying of something"

I was a winter's seventeen
as I stared out the window
of an old 91 Pontiac
at two in the morning
& saw the golden grass
churning the leaking dark
of the middle school meadow.
The moon died, was reborn
to a scaffold's womb.
We stayed up, but didn't speak.
Not even when we saw
amber hands gripping the field brow,
arranging the morning.
She started the car in the strip lot
& stole me home.

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.

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.

Oh, little sweet one -
you found me early, and held on tight.

Hundreds of photos prove in chorus
the joy you took in living.

You would climb to my shoulder,
like a honey-brooch, and perch -

gazing green-eyed out the long pane
at the small traffic below, the playthings

of your curious thought. I cannot bear
to give away your beige tree

so frayed and leafed with hair.
I cannot bear to gaze at the rug

where you delighted in long quiet hours
of happy sleep, dreaming of running,

legs twitching. Your love of tuna,
& endless inquiries into the open freezer door

charmed me anew each morning. Your purr
gathered in little hums and circles in my hands.

We both hated our many moves,
but you always found the best parts

of our new homes so quickly -
the bat-squeaks on the school roof,

or the mourning doves beyond the screen.
I miss the scrape scrape scrape of your foot

in the litter. I miss the little splashes
you made in the water bowl.

I miss you very much, little one;
you were the best part of me.

We winter creatures, here in the streets
under the cloud flat, the moon-press,
are bound to our random anywhere points,

with interior images in each: loves, agonies,
strangers we met for a close moment -
the world is filled with us, seeded with us...

The air is cold, it gathers around the mouth.
Dying wisps of speech arch up and away
in small hoods of steam and intention.

Rain digs into my cheek like teeth.
This street is an echo of the next street,
& it's papered with names, so many names.

You travel today
to Belgrade:
nightclub-on-quay.
You travel today
on an hour's ray
over green brocade.
You travel today
to Belgrade.

You are somewhere between
my awaiting gaze and
the awaiting days that
sit on the tongue's edge
of history, under sun's
streak that hems our world.

You are something between
the wise words of Hikmet and
the wise words of your own,
flown to me from
the Bosphorus,
full of wishes.

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.

I'm hunting the moon
with a harpoon of wine -
and you'll be here soon.

Play the wicked tune
that licks my spine
as I'm hunting the moon.

Pillows' scrimshaw dunes,
my veins like vines -
because you'll be here soon,

a swoon
bound with ribbon and twine.
I'm hunting the moon,

as it climbs in my room
trailing white foamy brine -
you'll be here soon.

It sways and croons
atop us, crystalline:
I'm hunting the moon,
for you'll be here soon.

Tomorrow the air
brights with
spark shapes
as sky fumes.

Beneath the
fire point pattern
my mind will be
elsewhere, pooling

across highways to the
airport where she'll
step from the plane
the day after.

Once the thousands
have decamped
from the green basins,
I will reclaim

the soft galleons
of lawn with her,
the grand marble
systems, rectangle

lullabies, and gallery
gardens, a new life.
And I'll tell her
about how I watched

all the new lush stars
that lived syllables
before collapsing
into pops of ash.

We look for solutions to this problem...
in the cloud rush, in the oven gas.

I found a medicine that I drink,
it clears the night wreathes away.

Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" plays
while the rain stomps in the black road.

That was us.... we were then,
among the cobbles and tombs,

hand in hand, absinthe and sugar
searing the air. We were; we were.

You held my thigh at night,
a bone against the insomnia.

The dark didn't come until later;
it had such a broad wing.

The hours grew late. The purple vine
clawed upward. The walls crawled with taste...

I lost my hold on things. Do you remember
how we watched the old Dean Martin

movie on TV in Rome? I drank beer
from a can while you laughed.

You laughed - it was the sweet middle
that sustained the world.

Now... now... the hour is long in the tooth.
My chest is a grave. There is nothing after this.

No, nothing - I'm sorry.
Dig this earth for no purpose, friend...

My ash collects around the fingertips,
waiting for the grand canal.

I was fifteen
in a birthday
room for Alan.
Lamps out,
air thick
with the flick
& sag of
a movie.
My slick hand
taken by the girl
on the floor.
White noise burst
in my mouth.
My heart
crawled
down the stairs.
The lamps
puffed on
and she slipped
my hand.
Each cone and
rod in her
green eyes
glistened,
adolescent.

I saw her again
at a house party
when I was
twenty-three.
Drunk on
Haitian ***,
carving out
a blood rhythm
under
a canopy
of memory.
Her lips shined
in memorial
to what teenagers
had been, once.

Later, I threw up
the *** into
the bushes
below the kitchen
window and I heard
her turn
off the faucet with
an indifferent laugh.

Dearest E--,

At your name,
an inner empire went to grass -
there was no saving it.

The aftershocks were felt
for several hours:
wracks, throbs.

The ****** sun wouldn't stop,
bright gristle mounted on acromion,
though the afternoon was finished.

E--, you can't shave me away
with distance; I know it pains you,
so here is a compromise:

you will be adored, but so quietly,
so politely. See, I can be reasonable -
I won't even send this letter,

Though I Remain,
Always Yours,
Evan

E--,

I packed your things today,
preparing for my new place:

donated all the old yoga clothes
ticked with high-tide sweat-marks -

kept the Turkish coffee set,
with its flattish copper faces -

still unsure about the books
that wait in the azure evening,

pages fluttering in a rain-wrest
that waves in with thick stacks of heat.

When we spoke last night,
it was like you were recalled from the dead:

The familiarity of your face and voice
filled this pink brain with ancient urges

that were almost immediately canceled
by the deep pauses of hairless hearts.

You are not really here,
although I sense you in everything.

The yellow Dulles gate is open to you -
if you choose to take it -

but you won't choose.
I am a forgotten drawing,

penned long ago
in a sketchbook left behind.

E--, you are a shadow,
standing in for a body

that still masters me
in all my essential motions.

I can't escape you,
& miss every minute

that our breath called common.
This sky is just a pale sapphire sheet

you saw hours ago. But now,
as you turn in for the night.

I send you my best.
Always, forever yours,

Dreaming of Dublin,
Evan

When I'm feeling down,
you speak to me -
I almost drown
when I'm feeling down,
but black and brown
give way to jubilee,
for when I'm feeling down
you speak to me.

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

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

I was once
told that I
wasn't afraid
of heights,
but of being
thrown from
them -
& this was
a comfort,
for the flaw
wasn't in me,
per se, but in
my reading
of other people,
my trust in
their intentions.
Even so, any
bridge was
breathing
knives.

Then I met
you, and we
walked over
Taft bridge,
the largest
unreinforced
concrete
structure in
the world,
rising above
Rock Creek
gorge, 128 feet
above the
bright green
floor I feared
until you.

We crossed it
in style. I was
in the angle
of the eagle.
I walked on
the backs of
lions. I held
light. My eye
surveyed the
depths of the
glen. I walked
with you by
my side all
the way to
Dupont,
& when we
shared coffee -
I spoke endlessly
to comfort your
excess of sun -
I felt a swerve
of glory, a sense
of the world
that I only
shared with you.

A bared sun tops
a chilly world,
last call's red
trees, yesterday's

rain, this shallow
scrape of hours
that pulls apart,
raw, gin-dipped,

a moon waxing over
the rose bush. This
is our ritual now,  
the breezy screen

of moments that hides
what is really felt.
Speaking your fear
makes it real. The rest

of it is all hard, too
Better to let silence
climb and fall. It's cruel,
those leaves.

A woman on the walk
chews on a white gap
that hovers in the tree.

A fleet of dead clouds,
dull gummy bumps,
reflect our hunched signals.

Even the road is false,
a mouth of crushed oil husks
that eats our fried blood.

This all collects into an afternoon
of chemical mistakes.
Thoughts that spongily refold.

We're reading with flashlights
under a shared blanket of grief,
eyes shining; incandescent wax.

A cloud is grimly passing,
                  passing grimly
o'er this raven cawing glibly,
mocking us with twilit eye.

In this hellish ev'ning hour
you clean the garage, clean and scour,
finding tomes both low and high.

But now you leave to do a chore,
forego the raven at your door,
who blithely chants his "nevermore,"
his soft ironic "less is more,"

the darkling chant in falling dusk.
The ice around the heart's not thawing
shadows form claw, fang, and tusk
from the raven's stony cawing,

and in the late and lonely hour,
lonely, late, and dimly dour,
a chill that passes cold and sour,
tells of ebon raven waiting,
a raven perched and blankly weighting

my soul against a feather,
now, and then forevermore:
a rainy hour's graven weather,
this black bird with his dread languor
whispers ceaseless: "nevermore."

The great key is twisting in the lock -
the keyhole moon is spinning.

Empty bottles rise like grass
from the ceramic tile.

The scattering people on the street
slice little hunks of joy

from the black slab
that squats over the city.

The sky is vacant,
the stars vacuumed away

so casually, replaced
by a fat cobalt shroud.

The scents of gin and ****
finger up through the humid cloak

before disappearing from human record.
This bed is a pit of silence,

a soft red hell, a place
for lonely drunks who turn the world,

waiting for her to come round,
come round, come round.

"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." -John 1:5

I find whisky grammar in the cold sluices,
in the curve of the thickened glass-ash.

The bourbon cask gave its woody soul
to the barley spirit, to the amber shadow.

The New Year comes but I reject it;
the sun-ball drifts yellowing like an old page,

the moon rises like a bleached skull.
Ireland came and went, full of green iron secrets.

My life was full, but now it is empty.
I live in a high room full of guitars,

full of alcohol, full of deathly ulcers,
full of Plath and her sweet ether.

The air is seared. The water boils.
The witch shakes her hazel wand,

& demons sigh in resignation - why bother?
Humans move the darkness in little pieces.

Somewhere in Sicily, in Silesia, in Kent,
my blood is moving without me. My blood -

it's loving another. It's never had a headache.
It actually lives a full life, somewhere else,

that good red life. But not here: Here,
I drink in the old cemetery, with the blurry pebbles.

for Lori


Foaming Pacific ovals
sweep cold over nephew's knees -

his laughter breaches sandy mount,
from flashing white crescent

of pepperminted mouth.
Palms above the char pit

chaperone my brother-in-law
as he hisses open enameled cans

of sweet seltzer. My sister
trades antique desert stories

with my aunt. Someone slings
Monopoly hotels back into the box.

August is climbing eastwards,
bringing a fog bank

that won't stop arriving,
arriving, always arriving.

In high school
I met you,
you belonged
to my sister's circle

to the fresh night
to the scent of a book
open golden spine
in a vanishing

bookstore.
These impressions
of you were right:
You told me later

of your pride
in breaking
into the play
despite the crossed

arms of the drama
clique, scorning
you, jealous.
& you started

a coffee shop
to fill the gap
& cure the smallness
of a small town

that struggled
to hold you.
You were one
of those I knew

would be leaving
soon. Too clever
by half,
already in the world,

already aching,
a blind seed
in a paper garden.
You got punched

in the gut
by the burned out
girl, initiating you
into something

nameless.
Sliding out
of the house
after hours

to see the boy
under moon -
No, to see
the black days band

& float above
all the hands,
some touch you
as a woman,

& it was in this
awareness
that I met you
in the land

of dust jackets.
My curiosity
was sharp
as a wasp's song:

you were
a walking yes;
you told me
about Anna's

bonfire flicking
your face
as you cross
the quiet fields

littered with love
& you wrapped
in sky until
the girls went hunting.

How you pierced
yourself at
that festival but
I suspect

you pierced yourself
in others ways too -
you were so aware,
looking

for affirmation
for connection,
even with the teal
pager you kept

in pocket and
would then
plug in your
secret phone

just for the call.
You challenged
it all,
rebel

determined
to be yourself,
acute push
against the bonds

of salted adolescence
of a Persian family
of being a woman

in a world
that tried to
fold that
against you.

You told me
all of this.
I met you then
and never

quite let go
even in the years
that moved
like free water

between us.
You came back
& my old
school thoughts

drifted out
of my mouth.
You gave me
memories

that I engrave
here. This is
all you.
It's you.

She walks the city
as it wakes.
Under cloud committee
she walks the city.
The river's pretty
as morning breaks.
She walks the city
as it wakes.

Dr Weathers wakes
to a ridging howl,
frostbitten, snowblind,
stumbles rudely ahead
on cold black feet,
& hands that might
belong to another –
they went solid in the night.
He plows white weight
as if underwater, the sun
suppressed behind banks & steeps.
But the mountain also rejuvenates –
he is curiously younger,
an adolescent dismay
of being cut loose and held back,
both at once, as the wind steals
bellows from his teeth.  
And then younger still –
teetering march step,
speech blanches in the throat,
his thoughts mirror his needs.
Imagine what the lower guides see
as he arrives, his face
porcelain in the light -
venous glaze, stony veil.
Imagine his infantile thoughts
as they swaddle him,
so glad to be awake.

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...

Sing whatever is well made,
every man that sings a song:

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
of night and light and the half-light,
you are more beautiful than any one.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire,
I swear before the dawn comes round again
to love you in the old high way of love.

I know that I shall meet my fate
though now it seems impossible, and so
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
the time for you to taste of that salt breath -
What is there left to say?

White wine bottle on its side:
lilacs pooling under plate lip
in a sudden, sodden gutter
of roughened moon-cloth...

The ice numbs the wrist;
my name is absent on the list.
Quarries of coffee grounds,
are excavated inside my eye:

names are so clear now,
like glosses of witch-hazel.
But what of the empty iris pit?
Linen flocks against stone,

& memory's evergreen hold
is strong: green queen-needles
mixed with the little pink curls
shaved off the inside of the skull.

Cherish the little triangles of skin
trapped by the dial tone collar:
it's all breaking away.
What is happening to me?

This dim rain stall,
cleated to a Friday,
stuck at half mast,
gray as an ash smear,
as an illness:

it's the hour to slip away,
sling down the wet road
to find newer bones,
fresher thoughts,
beyond this empty dooryard.

No more sullen hearth
gapped with chill:
step through the ring-necked
steam by the high cloud wall,
with a proper heart

that's open for business.
Pry loose the evening
like a wisdom tooth
from the silver city jaw.
A foxed blur hangs

in the spangled hedge:
It's a yesterday.
Turn your back to it.
Say yes to their hands,
say yes to their eyes.

I post a warning,
old friend:
I feel violently
about everything
you remember.

Like when
American iron
thrummed the air
all the way down
to Richmond.

Your future wife
had uneven floors.
I said hello
& was defined by it,
I was just
hello forever.

Peeling paint
rubbed off
on my fingers
as you two
went up
the braid of stair.

You in your
old shirt,
while I stood
unsteady,
filled with
the glassy venom
of cheap gin.

This opening world
is full of visible breath
curling over the blood house.
     I'm not in love anymore.

The air is crisp as bitters,
as spackled mud freezes
into rutted battlements.
     No, you haven't been.

Winter is a spill of grass
laced with sleet,
a quiet rind of snow.
     How long have you known?

A brittle red cloud
of sloey ice scatters
from a ginning curve.
     We should stop talking.

Domed salt vaults
rise by the highway
like a black dough.
     We can't keep doing this.

Drink winter down;
envelopes of night
are rapidly sealing.
     It's over, over.

The art of
blacking
the teeth -

The kettled
smile, coalish,
wet with steam.

The lacquer's
taste, like the
spaces between
the night grass.

The beauty of
the dyed mouth,
& the kisses that
reach from the
bottom of black
envelopes of sea

Where is your body
when you text me?

In the searching dark
of the bedroom, where

the drunks and gulls
bear cries against the window?

On the riverwalk
when the clouded gray

syrup leaks through
onto the water face?

By the fresh red trees?
The third floor coffee?

The archery garden,
near the strawberry tree?

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

filling these lines
3379 miles and 5 hours west

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

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

Black lips eat hours
all over Dublin -
but you sleep safely
in the red yesterdays
of my knot-bell heart.

Here in the waiting room
it's beige and safe.
Nothing like the room
where I'll divide my trauma
into lean little cutlets.

When I can't take it anymore,
I'll watch the fish
living in the doctor's tank,
thoughtlessly ******* down
bright quivers
of lamp stripes.

Dublin
girl,
laugh
with me
into the
exploding
green
of trees
coming
into leaf
in this
fast angle
of city,
while
I ****
an hour
on this
bench full
of speech,
watching
night low
into lilac.

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.

All things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things.
-Heraclitus

Black block grove and glade -
it's all translated to wet geometry

by the patina of the rain slant...
It's like a spell has been laid on this place.

We are those without bedtimes,
the quick pestles of clocks grind

past Friday night into Saturday,
the sky tinted, louched:

greening cloudy wash wringing
opals into the late softened minutes.

Things fall back as they were before:
night dissolves in the cold window hood

until the only dark things left are hands,
unstill under sheets of morning lake.

A ceremony
of sun in the

admitted eye.
The day drawing

away silently.
You, tempting

me with the
inviting

curve of
your cheek...

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.

To Meg Eden, after reading her book

Ugetsu - a shortening of u-sei-getsu, "A moon obscured by rainclouds"

There are towers of water standing
in the distance. They're waiting for us
to complete our denouement
before the fat, snapping rain drums
against the pebbled elephant skin
of street sick, slick with black petals.

Rain clouds obscure the moon,
headless, heedless, puffed out,
bruising wildly overhead
even as the veil comes loose.

We had this miraculous day,
as if nothing had changed.
You were still exactly yourself.
I missed your voice more than I knew.
Your keen eye, the same clever lens,
it held it all in, the same as before.

Your lovely, quiet soul...
I hardly know what to say;
I cried until my face ached
after you walked into the hotel.

Never Fear, love, never fear,
although you only know me here.
If the distance feels austere,
never fear, love, never fear.
For when I am at long last near,
touch to touch at our premiere,
you'll never fear, love, never fear,
although you only know me here.

Cherry florets
volley the branch-ends
in a new rain -
the attention of this world
seems endlessly divided
as I patrol envies of holly
and hyacinth, hands full
of Thursday.
You call me,
your hair grown long,
we chat a check-up
over your pasta.
Out the bearded window
infant blossoms crack out
into the wet drifts -
forgive me,
I am so bad at goodbyes.

****** wine-light crawls
the window ledge in Chelsea.
From our hotel room we can see
a blond wig fall to the floor
in an orange room across West 28th.
Out on the street, brown beer stains
spread across the peculiar night cloth.

People who can forget can let go;
the rest of us will remember
the way the moon rolled over
the highrises in Little Italy
by Gelso and Grand,
& got stuck in her eye;
I died more than a little.