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.

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.

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?

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Been talking about you lately,
the pint glass you slung at my skull

in your attempt to ****** me.
We ate the thigh of night

& demanded seconds;
not satisfied, the next day

we stole away from our desks
& kissed on the prow.

Webs of reddened light,
black-gapped fingers like antlers,

God, how we thirsted for it all.
Hair across your brow,

rain against the runny glass,
it was quiet for a moment,

but just a moment,
just a moment.

The train's
cleated toes
perch on volts
before dipping
into the cobalt
hologram of
morning.

White pebbled
floor reflects
in the window,
the platform's
strip of faces
wades through
ghostly stars.

The train climbs
the rusted ladder
with humming
hands. The anthem
of sun a blinding
glint on the hide
until it shrieks
into the earth.

Tunnel's halogen
skin dappled
with aluminum
song. This is
my stop, step
through the
birthing wings
into the ceramic
meadow. Gate
opens, subtracts -

I'm an Orpheus,
looking back as
a silvered Eurydice
is pulled away
from me with
a scream.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Green rapture of human life,
crazy hope, golden frenzy,
intricate unsleeping dream,
like dreams of vain treasure.

Soul of the world, demented lushness,
decrepit imaginary greenery,
the today of joyful expectations
and the unfortunate tomorrows.

Follow your shadow in search of your day,
those who with green glasses for cravings
see everything painted to their desire.

More cautious of my fortune,
I have both eyes, both hands,
and only see what I can touch.

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.

My face, knotted in the shopfront glass,
then smeared smooth, unfolding

in strangest waves and furls
until it's me again, the mask restored.

I do this several times. Step left,
I'm a minotaur, a funhouse scream,

a maze-horror, a twist and blink.
Step right, the pane straightens me

into a mid-life crisis.
But I can't help but wonder

if it's like a coat hanger:
once bent, never really true again;

the mirror regurgitates destinies
as casually as How Do You Do.

I wander down the walk and wonder
if my eye is still slivered and daubed

into a blanched, branched pool
of wild milk spoiling in the open air.

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?

"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?

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.

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.

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.

****** 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.

The night is filling up
with white wine and
other people's laughter,
but you are asleep,
moon-touched.
Can you hear the sea,
from your corner
windows, lapping
the stonework until
it's faceless?
Can you catch
that brief scent
of snow, before
the clouds dive?

No matter if you can't.
I send this
to tell you
what you are -
a flash of truth.

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.

Earhart is static.
In Pacific attics,
searchers hunt smoke,
fold maps, pragmatic.
But the search for fires stoked
with brush is done. She provoked
the upper angels unprepared,
and was broken.
It’s so clear, all the air
over this sea: no twist or glare
blots the view for miles,
though magnetic snares
****** with fields of smiles
the wayward compass, routes
drift from proscribed aisles.
Did she ditch in the blue mute
expanse, flare's salute
a last hope to unwind miles?
Planes get drawn back. It's moot.

A ceremony
of sun in the

admitted eye.
The day drawing

away silently.
You, tempting

me with the
inviting

curve of
your cheek...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[...] a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes.
-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


Greasy brown sun smeared over hill,
buttering palm trees, melting in bay.

The Pacific shuffles cold and blue,
Spanish roof is red tooth grin,

irregular and hungry. Day clatter,
hurly burly in the sand pine,

& I'm phasing out, a laugh
lost in sway grass.

Conversations carry late
with new old cousins.

My mind rattles and clots,
needs ballast. Shush. Shush:

fog rises from the sea,
it never stops arriving.