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.

I'm just sitting here,
thoughts sieving through the pane
in little tarry slices, sluicing slurs
or slurries against a night
of Georgian house-faces crowding
their brick-point cheeks
eastward towards a flat disc
of frost, cut with black wings.

The storm glass has birthed
a wicked ammonia flake
from the quartzy ethanol thigh,
which I guess means rain
will break in soon to blotch
& pock the walk, breeding
petrichor into the wine-dark
water-heart of sinking air.

I make rough gestures
towards civility and society,
keep the words floating above
the sutured margins of the wound;
wouldn't want to alarm anybody.
There is no rescuing sleep tonight,
only this scrying glass clotting up
with starburst funeral wreathes.

We held hands
as we approached it,
the pink, black,
orange monument.
We stood as if we expected
something from it,
but it failed us,
an indifferent oracle.
Your hand slipped from mine
as you stepped closer,
for a second you were
inside it, eaten whole
by its hide glue mouth,
before you drifted
in diagonals
to other colors.

Once, I was a man standing
in an airport, holding her -
a meadow of sweet, a hand
that browsed my secret self,
an incandescent eye that found
a gasp in the gap. And then I wasn't -
stripped of my companion,
I succumbed to whisky's scalpel,
lonely's pollution.
Now, fringing a sorrowful noon shush,
I watch an orange crossbeam throb
of crawling sun die by my foot;
considering this, I meditate in this glass,
pushing whisky into myself with serious intent,
pinned down by choices that are not mine;
the days slouch forward, despite themselves.

Thoughts like fire,
all about you.
Wilding desire,
thoughts like fire
devouring a pyre
to love unsubdued -
thoughts like fire,
all about you.

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.

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...

Well, here I am, without her -
in this new dark space
where I'm slowly breathing.
I pour another drink in the dark -

a few tremulous stars
encrust the subfusc city mantle,
& a bus growls off
down a flat hallway of road.

The floor is paved with books -
the cat sleeps under a half-moon
that's curled like a rotted aloe leaf.
How are things in Dublin, I wonder?

The night pools in the air,
above the sighing branch.
The kitchen is smaller here.
Grief leaks into the tight hours.

I see a bathroom light snap on
across the street. Birds clap across
the row. A car races down the rack,
& one more minute stutters away.

The rain plows leftover vapor
off the street, and into
the fawned sugar yard;
it's almost spring, and your birthday
is around every corner.
For me, nothing can dull it,
not even this smother of sun
screaming into the blanket,
or chilly gods that straddle
the graves of the air -
winter holdovers.
We are paused.
This gives me down
a jag of ****** noses,
& stain to salt my eye...
but I still adore your new nails
that pop scarlet,
your cloud of hair,
your count-coffee thoughts.
I hope you don't mind
that I can't always speak
without this heart-warble,
& that New York
doesn't wait for us,
not this year.

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.

Empty dress on hanger's *****-arm
where is your mistress? See that I burn,
stoked by her absence, and burned words
wheel inside me. Dusk's rusting flood  
of lawn where once she stood is only
now a crisp green leaning shadow.
Without her I'm a thousand times tired...

Empty dress with your gauzy charm,
you hang with a ghostly turn
over a vacant ankle. Yet as you're stirred
in the air, hope presses my barking blood,
a spark and spur. Dress, don't be lonely,
she'll be back soon to reclaim us, though
our lives may seem to hang on wires.

"We three, we're all alone,
   [...] living in a memory,
   [...] my echo, my shadow and me."


Over in the corner
are your books,
stacked into the wall.
I like to be the mourner,
it seems. Long looks
at your bric-a-brac, at all
the things you left.
The night is perfectly cleft
into darkness and silence.

What else can I do,
but poison myself
with sentiment?

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.

We're only two weeks away,
I can almost taste it.
The curtain rising on our play,
we're only two weeks away,
we'll hardly know what to say,
but we won't waste it -
we're only two weeks away,
I can almost taste it.

Rare girl,
so full of life,
watch how
three cartwheels
of years pursue
you, for you
are born from
the shavings of
the sun's golden
flanks, from
crystal splinters
of full moon,
from dreaming
flakes of rain -
little pieces of
every day that
went missing
over three years,
sliding away
to assemble you,
on that
perfect day.

Those three years
will always lie
to you, tell you
your birthday is gone
when they have
bundled it away.

But they know
that every
fourth year
you will
come for it,
& you will
open the day
like a package,
& with a spoon
you will eat the
honeycomb of sun
that is your birthright,
the sweet milk of moon,
on dishes of rain.

You are so open
to the world
because you are
so much of it.

Prepare well,
honey bird,
but don't dwell -
prepare well
for a spell
answering words.
Prepare well,
honey bird.

Blue-bruise gore slips
down the slick mirror face
of the lithe knife that skips
between the ribs - I've looked
at our old photos again.
Rotting ash knots choke the slow
red rhythm of the blood.

A bird dies against the window pane,
just a small thump in rain.

A ghost-head cinder
leaps from a white stalk
thrown to the gritted curb -
the moon is a wrecking ball.

It's a night to fold away
my thoughts like old sheets.
I let my submerged face swim
like a black-scaled fish in my glass,
before raising it to my lip slash.

The roof tiles peel away.
Bellies of shadow perish
in the autumnal cascade.

This grief settles in the grave-gully
of the pillow. Crooked queasy dreams
rise like foxglove from the sheets.
A thick paste fills my mouth: sleep.

The night
closed and
my tears
floated the dark.

My body curled away
in betrayal,
unwilling to meet you,
and I hated it.

Anxiety rose
inside me
like an electric hum.
My face was a shine,
a gloss, a smear
that hovered.

Please,
look past
the beating blood.
This was never me.

Stay in
late on Sunday,
when sleeves of keening rain
drape downcast hollies by the street.
Come here...

I am wayward,
have always been.
Yet I'm one sleep
away from you,

& I'm still:
still as the night leaf,
still as the larch post.
still as the new moon.

Here is the pool
of evening,
come to take this
waiting from me.

I am wayward,
have always been -
but for you, lovely one,
I am patient as saints.

The clouds are entrails
full of meals of sun.
There has been a petite
****** between us,
but I've forgiven it -
the heart is water.
That could be a lie;
the scalpel's slit is finer
as I sit here,
the ideal patient,
staring at a street
scrubbed with wind.
Please, never read this.

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

Neruda
my father,
Plath
my mother -
watch how
their child
eats the
raw
peach
fingers
of dawn
with
teeth
sharp
as poems.

Within
me, a
tower of
patience,
where
I stand
calm as
barefoot
trees.

It rains,
drops
fat as
cherry
stones,
as I
nestle
my stripe
against
my throat
in my
good
black
shoes,
aching
circles
of smiles
on my
cheeks.

Darling,
come hide
in my
heart
& peek
at the
soft
world
when
you are
ready.

There is
room for
both of
us in
here to
watch
the
accordion
of my
ribs
play
Astor
on loop
until the
cherry
rain
dies in
the branch
of sky,
revealing
the playing
card of
morning.

Occasionally
I will
pack a
suitcase
of language
and flee
to your
heart,
hiding
behind
the petals
of history
and art.
I know
I will
be safe
from
the shackles
of the
glacial
darkness.

Neruda
my father,
Plath
my mother -
I'm patient
& inevitable.
Love,
forgive
my queries
& take my
nine lives.

We have
claimed
the sun.
Come,
let us
steal the
moon, too.

The stair-shadow bar
a blackwood twist that swims
& recurves under elbow and pint.

Eyes knock in the false, exacted twilight,
against the yarded backdrop
of felt puddles stroked with chalk.

Here is a glass of rye - it waits
in amber for the pink warm wash
of my prowling, kissing palm;

here is a glass of Powers - the sweet
scent flowers the stale angles,
fumes away beyond the lip line.

Things can't quite be read -
what does the canted shoulder mean
when it turns my way?

Words tumble into the chrome-crumbled
struts of the barstools. A kölsh floats into me,
then two, small columns of silted yellow.

On leaving, I am amazed to find
the cheer-charred night, rude gestures
of moon sweeping the towers,

& a fearful silence that finds its harbor
deep inside the glen of my ribcage:
a barking heart, chained to its house.

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.

Chest packed
with fearful
breath.
Sun wash
the bright
piece low.
Don't move
farther,
stay here
by my blue
posting.
Answers
flock and
scatter.
A handful
of lilies,
the knot
that cruels
in the throat.
Come and
claim me -
isn't it clear
that I just  
want you?

Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.

It's tempting
to restart history
with this nocturne
I play for you.

Let all the books be
an empire of cinder
swept away by an
indifferent breeze,
long diaries of ash
caught in the pines.

Your words, your kiss
will be the first on record.
We will write new volumes
in a ****** world.

But first let me finish
this nocturne I play
for you late, late
in the night.

"Wealth is lent us, friends are lent us,
man is lent, kin is lent;
all this earth's frame shall stand empty."
-The Wanderer (anonymous, late 800s or early 900s, as translated by Michael Alexander)

To hell with all of it:
shove sun away,
bury a moon in a drawer.

Let lovers lend a mouth or breast:
we beetle down our daily work,
lulled to amnesia by the churn.

Our meal of the world is so brief:
televisions smear us with static,
while the sky dwindles to a scream.

The man in the white
sequin jacket shoulders
his way down Q Street
to 17th where jutting

red lights tint night
on blacktop, folding,
splayed across the feet
of the ladies strutting.

Screwtop wine's pylons
trip the turn as throats
strain to cheer & scream
as favorites drift by,

spitting "come on,
baby," then float
away, down the dream,
slipping us some thigh.

Behind me, an Italian
man breaks up
with his boyfriend over
the phone.

Around us a battalion
of truculent drunks
with fabulous drovers
ride some rolling crones.

An old sad cuss
continually thumbs
some poorly angled
shots of legs

Racing for the bus,
we quilt our memory from
spare light spangles,
wild dregs.

The birds are rioting - dispelled
in a shudder from the arm
of the fog-headed elm that splays
towards fresh pins of frost,
wind spoons them down to grass.
O little birds, I too am pulled -
a branching ardor folds and flays
my days to nights. Her easy charm
spills across me and I'm as lost
as the brittle leaf-eye that last
breaks from the tree into new winter...
The birds fork to ledge or hedge
as I walk on - my unruly center
tamed and shaped to urgent pledge.

I hold no high grievance
in my heart this morning:

not for the ex-wife combing
smoke signals from an outer reef

not for the crass jackhammer
breaking the city's black bones,

not for the fresh pink sky
that won't turn blue for me,

not for the dying elm leaf
that fell across my feet as I walked

over chilled rye grass, breaking
the breeze in two with my chest.

Love, please tell me
where to cast my life -  

The ivoried downtown
and sleeted piers

of Washington,
where the Potomac

sleeps itself blue,
& the rows of museums

pull coffee teeth
in a closed afternoon?

Or the northside quay
& green garden walls

of Dublin, where I walked
in your hand, eyes to brim,

out to Phoenix Park
to search for the fallow deer,

but finding instead
only a debris of wind?

I'm owned by neither:
I wake each day

into a dead space
without color or shape,

only these memories -
do you remember

leaving yoga on
Connecticut Avenue,

the petrichor winding
out the night's full flower,

the nuzzling shine
of the walk?

I don't care
where it happens,

but that's what I want,
every day,

those steps home with you;
every ******* day.

Don't feel blue,
Melis dear -
there's so much to do.
Don't feel blue,
you'll see it through.
Sorrow will clear!
Don't feel blue,
Melis dear.

O xanthous brickwork, your scars
canted with shadow... my mirror platter
cries on the left hand side, and cool air
settles in the burnished tree tops.

It's almost October and the days just pile
on top of each other without any meaning in them.
I wet my face at the vessel, soap to soak,
waiting for the death of the aloe flower

that perches on its lonely stalk,
defiant and sorrowful, tendril shaking
in a cold busker's breeze.
Scuttling traffic claws into the dim hour,

the sun wests away; brick goes dark,
browning like steak. The air rises
into the ape-hour to meet the landslide
of dead angels flickering across the band.

My father left me
when I was four.
After that, I saw him
on weekends,
& discovered he filled
his coffee cups with bourbon
& sipped it all morning,
taming the demon day
while I watched the early shows,
                             insensate.

Now Dad is gone.
I am past forty.
The woman I thought I would love
long into the purple evening
has left me.
I fill my cups with Scotch
in the early mornings,
fail at meditation,
sip away the dead days,
the dead days.

The sad old dracula
totters down Lamont,
smells like brandy.

White hair puffed
with talcum or flour,
last year's grease
paint blood running
mouth to chin, collar
turned out high,
swaying on heavy
feet among the happy
terror of children.

He sits on the curb,
falls asleep.

Who knows what
escape he sells
to himself, what
weight this dissolves?

A toddler leaves a fistful
of candy at his feet,
for him to enjoy when
the sun is thrown out
onto the street.

Watch the wild swans
that glide the pool.
In the blooming dawn
watch the wild swans
spread wing until gone -
A white thread unspools.
Watch the wild swans
that glide the pool.

The moon's orange
like a rotten peach
crowded in a corner,
torn like wallpaper.

On the parapet,
etch my heart
into the air with
fading smoke.

Try to solve
the broken
code of stars.

Try to dissolve
the high miles
with *****.

Try to absolve
the gods that
made it this way.

A silver lake of fog
rests by the ten oaks.

Smoke shivers too,
thin as a wafer.

Against the clouds
is a mirage of small birds.

Massless morning,
scalloped rain,

long as Sunday,
old as poison.

K----,

You are fresh milk
& I am lemon pulp.

My acid smile pools
on my face, pink curdled shadow

aimed at your corner.
You are so young:

you mock the silver sway
that drips down my cheeks.

You are draped in yourself,
but I don't really mind,

because you're clever. Inside you
I think there's something tender;

but it's not for me to uncover.
I'll sit in the angle,

the beer cranny, and glance
your way with eyes full of sugar.

The night dies waltzing
on yellow lemon heels;

the day is born in a flicker
of snide cream cloud.

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.

My glass
is all ice and
cheap *****.

My eye drowns
with envy in
your clean kõlsch.

Neither of us
speak a word
about marriage.

A shadow spread over us
as we lay there in the fields.

It ate flower, grass, and hill
with ohaguro teeth.

The world was soft and chilled
in the belly of the shadow -

we hid our hands
under each other's shirts.

When it moved we chased,
laughed among blonde furrows,

stumbled in the gritted ruts -
but it was gone. I think

we both know what it meant.
Where are you, now?

This is life?
Starting the journey
with a rough beginning,
carrying a turning mind
within a sunsetted body,
some kind of a self.

And this is the self?
Carving through life,
carving through the body,
on the streaking journey
into the mind?
It's a beginning.

Or something like a beginning.
I'll pick up this self,
clean out this mind,
baptize a new life.
Go on a long journey,
remodel the body,

the aching body
right as it's beginning
to stray from the journey.
Guard the self
against life.
And the mind,

be careful with the mind,
more than even the body.
Because this wild life
is only the beginning.
The roles of the self
change so much on the journey.

No, plural - the journeys.
Likewise, the minds,
and the many selves
you'll have. The bodies,
the beginnings,
the lives.

Because the body and mind
are always beginning. The self
is a journey. That's life.

I am somewhere between
your waiting eye and
the slatish sky that
breaks away easy from
the office of rain that
withholds half a world.

I am something between
the passion of Yeats and
your passionate wait,
given to me across
the five hour sea,
full of firsts.

1980s,
America,
in a field.

I have a baseball,
and I'm throwing
& retrieving it.

At the edge of
the field is
a pine forest.

The forest is
unnaturally
still.

I'm afraid of it -
maybe it's
my subconscious,

maybe it's
death,
maybe it's just

the unknown.
Eventually,
I throw the ball

so deep
into the air,
a perfect arc,

that it enters
the forest's
edge. Slowly,

I go to find it.
Just inside
the forest

are strange
& hideous
snarls,

& then
something pushes
me down.

All the grass
in the field
turns black

in one moment.
The last thing
I see before the end

is the closing pines,
they're hungry,
so hungry.

This is my left hand in the mirror,
twinned and pinned to the glass,
hanging in the black valley while a song
rips me along the old perforations,
& the whole moment splits -
the light wavers over the mantle,
a ball of ghost, a past thing,
memories sold away in ingots.

This sordid exorcism hinges
on night pictures that I can't shake:
a backward lens, a frozen belt-step,
a long lawn with green marrow.
No, that dream is just watery pulp,
like when you squeeze a plum too hard
& the juice sticks and stains
in the white noise web of your fingers.

Christmas drifts by
under insensate stars,
under a blue scarf
of evening, under
some ether, under
risers of smoke.

Yellow Spot is poured,
& moments begin
to skip away
into the fallaway rain.
Christmas is red fingernails
and a green sweater.

Christmas freights along
in shovels and palms.
It walks the streets.
It drops into parks, silently.
It sips its Yellow Spot,
or something like that.

Dearest,

I sit with your plucked wildflowers,
in the near blue hours that ramble past
like a coach-and-four. You return
"upon the morrow” and I have said
your name aloud so often
it is thin as gold leaf.
Crow's speech marks the new day
under a gunmetal fog-dome
that slips spells in the sinking heat.
The gray river sidles along the city;
I'm out of time. I send my love.