The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.
-Sylvia Plath, "Contusion"


The job hunt is not going well:
wrong man in wrong city, no timing,
no luck - now I rise with worry

stuck inside my ribs, crouching
fat and cold where the heart was,
new clock flooding me with off-beats

so that I stumble in wrong-footed falls.
I'm fed by only sleep and steady rain:
all news, it turns out, is bad news.

Perhaps tomorrow the sun
will quit and I can take that job,
pacing to and fro, annihilating clouds,

handing things off to the night shift...
But no: I'll wake to indomitable silence,
a dread of mailmen, and ever-hungry cats.

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.

It is a night
of champagne and ashes.

Here is a glass
that never stops weeping,

singing your name
with a wheeling hunger.

I sit just nearby,
under yesterday's chandelier,

reaching your sleep
with all ten fingers.

Tonight I'm rioting
with your smile,

and my skin
is insane from wishing.

Tomorrow I will be satisfied
with your wanton eye,

and the clever flood
of your lip.

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.

I bite a green guard
as the invisible nurse sings

to my hand full of spices,
& I'm ejected into a sea:

slow as hadal whale fall
I snow into plural black

that teems with grim promise:
someday I'll return here

without a nurse's silk road
escape route in my vein.

I wake to an ulcerous world,
my cotton gown no shield at all

against the dark aquarium
of dense sleep that I now know

slouches with thickened shapes
that devour dreaming eyes.

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.

We lapped the ice as it came apart,
breathing the thick frost in pieces
that melted in the lung.

We raced. It all caved in
before our eyes, chrome drop,
aching flakes mounted our hair.

Faster, Emily, faster –
loosen the knees that hold flight in them,
as white evening’s fallaway comes.

I quit two miles before. I sat in the car
and watched in wonder as you hit the vanishing point
and became this snow lyric.

Out beyond the chilling rain
that crawls along the window pane
you arrive into this city.

I sip coffee and calmly wait,
watch the glimmer of your plane,
out beyond the chilling rain.

The heavy clouds are strangely straight,
and through their splitting throat's refrain
you arrive into this city.

From my body's thin estate,
black capes of breath emerge and strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,

to gather by the open gate
where with your bright campaign
you arrive into this city.

The dawn seems oddly late,
but I know that in this hour's strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,
you arrive into this city.

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.

I cast a spell in the afternoon:
a wand flicks and a cat vanishes

only to reappear chewing on a feather
with a small plastic baseball attached,

both strung on elastic cord that runs
to the black stick in my hand.

She gnaws the baseball bird,
conqueror, dominant victor

in her bedspread domain.
The other cat sullenly spies

with side eye, eager to join
but loathe to wrestle the calico.

With another spell, the feather is freed
to flight across couch, across chair,

bouncing with fat temptation
until it returns to the patchwork lair

of the huntress, who snakes a paw
to stop all renegade motions.

These are the death throes
of the baseball bird, whose final arc

ends in fang and claw on a quilt square
that purrs darkly with city sunset.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"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.

"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.

The left-hand
shadow of
the ocean
curdles in
the small of
the back,
& legs ache
down dune
lanes, dawn-
marbled
sand squares,
pine-pitted,
while lungs rub
the court of ribs.

I'm looking
for anything
that resembles
a memory
of my father.

Salting sun,
mezcal splash,
spiced crab -
hints of him
here and there.

I carry him
in a cradle
of tattoos
across my
arms but
it's not
the same.

So I run
the beaches,
recalling
the time we
stopped at
a flooded
road on the
way into
the city and
Dad thought
for five solid
minutes about
whether we might
make it across
the dark water.

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...

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.

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.

First you get a swimming pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
Pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
-Kendrick Lamar, "Swimming Pools"

O milky cataracted eye of moon -
your brow a brittle wet-black shadow
of grave silence and starry freckle -

your gibbous gaze is cast at me,
but what do you see?
A poet who refuses to grow up,

who drinks scotch like wine,
& wine like water. Whose heart
stains his sleeve, who listens

to gin glories and sin stories,
slurring insurrections from the red
nest in the middle branches of me.

At 17 I dated a librarian who I loved
& thought I would marry.
God, how I loved her...

but it failed on a windy night
in a dorm littered with beer cans
& her pale blue infidelities.

Then at 23 I married, things slid
& slid and slid, the nights blurry
& dead; then there was nothing left.

At 28, the girl who was so angry
we were banned from seven bars
after she broke glass at my face,

crying and screaming and kissing me.
At 29 I dated the blonde *******,
who wanted a master and not a lover,

impatiently splayed across the bed,
waiting for someone I wasn't,
waiting for the perfect sober iron lash.

I dated and married, then did it again,
my moon always in Pisces,
my soul here and there,

a mechanism more than a man,
depression echoing like a bell
from Dublin to DC and back.

My father died of drink,
& sometimes when I'm in my cups
I contemplate my own destinies.

This family drinks its anesthesia,
accepts a ghosting numbness
& pretended ignorance. Don't look -

the prodigal son has fallen
on the threshold, and the moon
has no arms to lift him up again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He thought at us in hissing chops,
our phones open lone black lids

& bloom our rooms with oddities,
raving cardiac tumbles into blank scrawl

that came from no place we knew,
sloughed from an under-yeared heart.

The pain pressed out from the glass,
topographical agonies in the dark,

a rake's frenzies of bleak humor
aimed at no one in particular

until it drained to a feverish bankruptcy -
he asked how M. G. died, if we thought

that's what would happen to him.
Who knows what the others thought -

I felt his mind bedded down in self,
a corner stall of gravel and nails,

tried to distract with jokes of my own,
don't know if it worked or not.

The phone in hush, the hour now
delinquent, adrift, exhausted.

In the hills, the cities: he braced us
each to the next, acid-pitted night minds.

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.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.

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.

Little nooses of rain extend downward
in black runnels from the char-cheeks
of death's head pillows that scrape
off the humid rust from a mid-afternoon.
Throw open the windows, let the dark
steam that climbs from the lawn clippings
approach the nose like an awkward dog,
until it clings in the back of the throat,
to be washed down with raw scotch.

The rough breeze dies in the shaking green
berries that dot the holly dome,
the rain stops in the street, chastened,
& fat clouds grease on westward;
she's not here and she won't be again -
her cast-offs lie in shallow oubliettes,
in shadow-bottoms of torn paper boxes -
but this new-shirt weather speaks her name
in the Braille-pecks of new, blue sky.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Deoch Chas-ruisgte - the third drink of the day, taken while still barefoot

Face to face with soap-fingered morning,
an abyss bounded by vapor trails,
an unblinking eye stares back from the glass.

Once, I woke with a lover in this bed,
her hands braced against my back,
as if keeping me from falling.

Now the daylight is my chilly crutch,
a mocking rain-ring sliding over
the madhouse orange of the turning trees.

When I was a child, I was left to my own devices;
you'd think solitude wouldn't poison me this way -
yet even the afternoon breeze shaves me down.

The little cat and the sunbeam
do their daily pas de deux
while I think about the blood-flower

that emerged from an angel's mouth.
A year of snow-tides, of shipwrecks...
Oh, god...

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.

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

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.

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.

Young men in glazy unison
wreck over lipstick shoals

until last call's klaxons
lure a few to paddle back

& pony up for a last fist
of foaming heart.

I'm past my sailing days,
so I watch from hot shade

with germanium on/off eyes,
surrounded by ten brave

who said yes to an evening.
Leaving into the electric bower

under bud-sparked trees,
our heels are free of night,

everything is open,
& forty-five seems no great age.

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.

Ochre chaperones
watch stolidly
as I bawl
into floorboards.
But I hold on
to my hopes -  
"best vibes forever,"
I promised that,
& I'll keep it.
Amber eye
on the pole,
please don't tell on me,
let me sink to
the laminate tonight,
choking on name.

Things between us
have reached such a low
that I'm drunk at noon
on a Wednesday in October.

But what if I grabbed the sun
for you, shaking it free
from lacy palms of cloud,
and gave it to your greennesss?

Would it be enough to fix it?
Or are all these drams
of Scotch just turning out
dreams in the early afternoon?

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

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

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

You came
from verdant Dublin
by word and by mouth.

Ancient sorceries
dealt the evenings
like playing cards.

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

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

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.

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.