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.

Once I would
take a word,
like lake, and
use it to tell you
how I was afraid
of losing you
by hiding in
that word:

"I am under the wall of lake,
pressed thin as parchment
in the inhaling dark,
by the shape of where you were."

So what is there
to find in this poem?
The television's grit
and glow, by which
I mean I sit alone.
The frost in the glass,
by which I mean
I am thinking of you.
The fox in the snow,
by which I mean
I miss you terribly,
& I am not afraid
of saying so.

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.

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.

Long stripes of petrichor,
gather in the cuff-corners
of the nightwalk - I miss her,

the blonde from group therapy
however many years ago, L-----,
whose upper case traumas

mirrored mine on that beige couch
by the waiting room sand garden.
Hard-hided years, those,

& I hope she did OK.
Myself: I tried in desperation to marry
someone who simply didn't run,

& you can imagine how that went.
I remember seeing L----- on a Wednesday
or Thursday morning, so surprised

I existed outside therapy. Greening wings
of grass spread across Farragut's diagonal,
& her black shoe arch pressed the world

firmly away. She rafted into a doorway
as everyone eventually does in a life.
The sun called in sick, the moon

maw yawed and yawned, the sea
throbbed foam over stone. New rain
on my face - it was just rain, just rain, just rain...

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.

Do you
think about
when we
discovered
hornets
in the grass
lot by the
apartment?
They were
drunk on
fallen apples,
and just
watched us
laconically.

I hope you
think about
yourself the
same way -
look back
& remember
you were
a hornet,
lance-cruel,
drunk on sugar,
having wings
you didn't use,
as I walked away.

I'm sure
you don't
think of me
at all. Good -
I hope that
I am your
lacuna.

The moon comes double,
with a necklace of river.
It sighs and sighs
in black flakes of rain.

Red trees give us
mouthfuls of nocturnes,
like doves whistling
from the roof.

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.

They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.

"I'm in love,"
so I shrink the world
down to a fatality,
something you could
wring out with *******.
The atlas makes scrape sounds
as Europe folds in half;
North America offers
nothing but slippery pulp.
This green touches that green -
if only distance were like this,
reduced like a wine sauce,
Washington sidling to Dublin
like old friends at the bar,
while collapsed Atlantic
makes a blue U shape,
bent.

[...] 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.

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.

Ancient rain still wreathes your hair, lingers,
unwilling to assume the mantle of air. I am flame,
I am July, ascending into strange worship.
Be careful even as you read this, your eye vulnerable
in the desert ruin of this page, each word entwined
with the quiet, holy book-scent.

N, was this an invitation to you? Bathed in the scent
of mint from soccer field gardens that lingers
despite twenty years of memorial rust, entwining
with your dark hair that flashes guttering flame.
Mint and hair our prophesy, but still vulnerable,
liable to dissolve. Let us by reading worship

the old poets; Lorca our hymnal. We’ll worship
as fervent heathens until no mint, no hair, no scent
of books can stop this ribbon river moment, invulnerable.
Old orbits decay invisibly but still we linger
in our mansions of hurt histories, cored by the flames.
I am reduced by degrees to a shadow, entwined

with a false animal made for the world, entwined
the way the barb is with the wire. Worship
is fading smoke crying nostalgically for flame,
is the intoxicating almond whose scent
bears the mystery of cyanide. Come, N, linger
in my world with me, so vain and vulnerable.

Savonarola burned away the vanities – wooden and vulnerable,
the crooked dice screamed. Playing cards entwined
with the illustrated pages of risqué books, a perverse worship,
a sacrifice that rose in pornographic ash and lingered
in the branches of midnight above charcoal Florence until the scent
collapsed soft as a sigh back into moraled flames.

N, perhaps you are the consuming flame
in this story. Am I your violin, varnish melting, vulnerable?
Or am I Savonarola, lighting the first match, the telltale scent
of match heads gambling in the breeze? We are entwined
in a new history. Come read with me. Worship
the blind hills of the sea. Their melancholy lingers.

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?

I have seen strange things, Celalba:
clouds wrecking, runaway winds,
high towers bent to kiss their foundations,
the earth vomiting its very bowels;

hard bridges breaking like tender reeds,
prodigious streams, violent rivers,
waded poorly even with cleverness,
mountains poorly bridled;

the days of Noah, people high
in the tallest of the pines,
the most robust and skyward.

Shepherds, dogs, huts and cattle,
I saw floating, without form or life,
but I feared nothing but my misery.

Fly home, my dear,
and love your life.
Until you're near
fly home, my dear,
don't veer,
but straight as a knife
fly home, my dear,
and love your life.

Laces even
as sutures
carry midnight miles
at the black river,
the broken-backed
streets of Georgetown,
a silent yard
of snow roses.

The anvil of night
just stops there,
& the chandelier
of air tightens
slight as wire.
Vaults of cold
ache in their arches,
as back windows
broadcast lives
vaguely beyond
fraying wreathes
of fog.

This is a city
of runners.
Thousands
cut open
the moment
& burn flight
onto the winter weave.
Skin is song.
The heart cants
forward, leaning
into the fallaway.
Always forward,
always forward,
runners sing -
there is nowhere
else to go.

Up the black, sticky stair,
break into the wet street
just before eleven; a girl
with lopped lilac bangs snarls
in profile while curling beams
seep from her cell.

I walk home, avoiding my reflection
in the shop windows, mumbling
the pine bird sermon I heard years ago,
when I was drifting drunk
in the fire yard, full of honey and ash,
bottles popping in the pit.

Let the night slide on -
let the black gull draw down -
The door closes so softly
on that old smile...
The sheets on the bed
grip me with soft, cold hands.

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.

So this is fallout -
The trees are choking
with ghosts that hang
like windchimes
from each atomic bough.
This is the aftermath.
The steam has long
since escaped, the cores
are ruined settlements
that glow furious gloam.
We carry them
with us, hearts knock
beat to beat, churning
something heavy
that already hardens.
Angels decay.
Summer is columns
& columns of them
carelessly spilling
into the empty
cooling pond.
What happened
to us? Years went
wrestling by
into the abyss. Clawing
to the surface,
this is what is left.
The trees are coughing
with ghosts.
I take you
and place you
gently among them.

Cinder-headed,
I swim smoked
tea until tongue's
angles of ash.

Marbling ache,
eyes threaded
with fever, skin
rides every last

avenue in the air.
Thoughts scatter,
ice diary desolate,
cinder-headed.

Your
light-
headed
morning
leaves me
anxious:
the mist
in the
air seems
impenetrable,
& the
sun is
forgotten
in a gray
pocket.

Getting
out, you're
searching
for baby's
building,
lace dress
in box's
paper
nestle.
You send
a picture
and I'm
liquid as
a tea light.

My
thoughts
follow
you,
step for
step.

A long
night of
mixing
memories
with
high-test
beer
fades me.
In the morning
the nephew
builds a fort,
abandons it
to run a
railway.
In an
act of god,
the rails
are crushed
with laughter.

I'd give
anything
to rise
from the
bottom of
this sea
of boxes
and take
your
temperature
with the
back of
my hand
against
your brow.

As you speak Turkish
to your sleeping hand
the sun raises pink
frequencies in
tremendous arches
through radioactive
lozenge clouds.
I adore you
helplessly as we
split circles of grace.
Citrus banners
break in the distance.
The lawn is forever.

This is our
first meeting.
In the impossible
whiteness of
the airport, you
appeared in my
arms, six hundred
pages of waiting
come blinking
to life. I have
discovered I cannot
ever kiss you
enough - the
fallow hush
of sky urges me
to drink you.

So I do.
My life opens
for you, deep
green slices.
You are the
same, and
this is our way.
Words silver
the citizen air.
Heat drips
down our
backs. Hearts
are crisp with
truth.

Errant firework in the distance,
folding sun in a west bed.
The evening is dying, canceling
away in the purple shade.
I walk south, west, west,
until I'm on the mirrored water,
a new Narcissus in the valley,
among the rusted thighs of the city.

Everything is a memory of her;
the cocktails, the coffee, the sherry,
the faint scent of rosewater,
the long theater grass.
But now it's cleared away
by ice cream men and sirens
as far as the river steps,
the descent into the sunken palace.

An orange layer blankets the evening flow,
& the haunted asphalt is a black spine
of humid trees. She is gone,
but her outline remains everywhere.
Tonight I'll wander to the whisky bar
& buy forgetfulness.
A distant sky presses in;
this place is far from everything.

Though I always try,
I am not always a
creature of grace.

Sometimes I open the
same foolish veins
as everyone else.

I can look back
in sadness and anger
& feel like hell about it.  

One worry masquerades
as the other - hard
to tell them apart.

But once you've pulled
it together, at the bottom
are the unassailable truths.

It doesn't take grace
to know your heart,
only a hard-won trust.

There is always
a little uncertainty
& a little worry.

It always pays to be
alive and open to the
width of the world.

And, darling, there are
people like you
for whom it's all worth it.

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.

O cyclopean sun,
mounting and diving
the broad chamber,
blue over blind,
yellow rhyme,
lambent cirrus-stained eye...
I walk your heart.

I laid there
for hours
and listened
to the rain,
unable to
sleep. It
dropped
in mild
lambent
waves all
down the
grass rail
and across
collars of
trees. The
street was
splotched
with wet
shadow.
Eventually,
I knew that
sleep would
not come for
me, I went
out as you
suggested.
The rain
truckled
down my
knee,
behind
my ear.
I felt it
assemble
on my face.
Standing
in the dark
buttons of
the yard,
I put my
hand on a
corner of
life, and
stood in the
water brow.
Clouds sank
like the
shoulders of
frigates.
I went back,
having
annexed
a dream.

I love you
like eating bread dipped in salt
like waking up burning at night
like drinking water straight from the tap.
like opening the heavy package in the mail
without knowing what it is,
excited, happy, suspicious
I love you
like crossing the sea for the first time
like something moving inside me
when night falls softly over Istanbul
I love you
like thanking God that we're alive.

[Seviyorum seni
ekmeği tuza banıp yer gibi
Geceleyin ateşler içinde uyanarak
ağzımı dayayıp musluğa su içer gibi
Ağır posta paketini
neyin nesi belirsiz
telaşlı, sevinçli, kuşkulu açar gibi
Seviyorum seni
denizi ilk defa uçakla geçer gibi
İstanbul'da yumuşacık kararırken ortalık
içimde kımıldayan birşeyler gibi
Seviyorum seni
Yaşıyoruz çok şükür der gibi.]

Go for a walk
in the unbroken
Saturday, the trees
sling themselves
at the upper blue,
the ash wall rustles
and the russet fawn noses
the cherry branch snarl.

A stillness about the hands,
near where the wasp
was singing. A stillness
on your side of the world,
where the new stars
are out roaming again.
A stillness broken when
the wind strums us
with its wild comb of fingers.

I often wonder
if maybe I am
the only man
in Washington
calling his lover
in Istanbul.

These poems shriek
through the air,
shaking the line,
coursing through
systems of white,
silent satellites,
breath in the valleys
of our hands.

So when I tell you
that I love you,
the words fill
all the spaces
of the world
before they are
presented to you
on your page
of glass.

Fleeing line cross-wave,
lateen sail's white-flash,
buckling up the race-wind:
caravel out on the blue-green,
making every speed-point
under the gray coast-cloud -

You,
     on your way to me.

Frank takes another ****,
& ribbons of condos
emerge from the hills.
He leans into a rustle
of unwrapped rain,
waiting for it to slip off
so he can fly fish again
out at Michael's Mill.
He's been cooling heel
for hours, but he makes
a good point:
the river yields bluegill,
the kitchen table yields
bills come due.

"Ghost cries out to ghost -
but who's afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
that start from my own feet."
-Theodore Roethke

It's true that each dark step
in the night-heavy hall
is given to the grave
in the air.  

But never, never accept
death's creaseless small,
cold palm. Be brave -
even a breath is a prayer.

You are my music,
on this long Friday.
Colonies of love
rescind the distance.
Your chestnut eye
amid glen and grass.

The scent of fresh grass
is rich as music,
rich as a soft hazel eye
on a sun-stolen Friday.
What distance?
There is only this love,

this cascading love.
No lance of grass
can close the distance,
only the piano's music,
a flight of Fridays,
a caramel eye.

And that Turkish evil eye,
hidden away with love
until that Friday
I tasted the bitter grass
and heard tense music.
And you, in the distance...

What distance?
Your soft brown eye
is here, a type of music,
an immense love
laying in the grass
on a whistling Friday.

It's always a Friday
with long distances
tucked under grass.
Your beckoning eye,
brimming with love,
singing with such music...

Love has no distance -
This Friday I'll make music
in the grass of your eye.

Spring is gin
weeping
in the hand,
Malbec against
the wrist,
the deep-drafted
light cresting
all their laughter.

It's hard to bear
when I'm over
here, in the other
hand of the night,
running beneath
the moon as it
wanes down
into the river,
as if trying
to push me
your way.

"What's your greatest ambition?"
"To become immortal, and then die."
-Jean-Luc Godard in Truffaut's Breathless


O immortal reader:
join me now (in a pine grove)

where in last night's dream
I attended my own funeral.

Oh no, it's not so morbid
(think of Tom Sawyer).

Besides, at 4:30 (not even dawn),
cats woke me in the half light

before the thing in the grave pit
began stirring and branching

(upwards? downwards?).
Instead I heard the speeches,

(tremulous and sentimental).
I saw the old pictures pinned

to the poster (I looked decent).
No one would talk about how,

how it happened,
but everyone said "I never

thought it would be like this."
(What does that mean?)

And, most mysterious of all,
"At least he achieved his ambition."

When I woke (born to shadow),
I had no idea what that might be,

but pennants of dawn are flying
over a moon drowning in a coffee cup.

What now?
Even the doves
flocking at
the window
chide me
as I weep
for the six
week anchor
inside me.

It was hard to be wise....
You must eat change and endure
-Robinson Jeffers

Unzip this skin and see
your words impaled
on these tusks of heart:

curled myrtle wreathes hung
so pretty on a chamber door.
Look deeper - I am stuffed full

of your words, crushed up
like newspapers so they all fit,
the ink staining my fingers.

Unzip me and see them all
scattered like black poppy seeds,
like black ash on the wall

of the oven. You left them
all behind without asking,
left me too full of them.

I tried to tattoo over them,
I tried to ***** them out
with scotch (O how I tried

& tried and tried)
I tried to rake them away,
I held funerals for them

black wax candles, hex-moons,
but they never slept, and soon
they itched their way free.

Come get them -
you must be running out
of new things to say.

You're the one
who fills my days with pleasure.
Under endless sun,
you're the one
whose joys run
without measure.
You're the one  
who fills my days with pleasure.

I miss you, dear sweet,
deep in my bones.
In the high city heat
I miss you, dear sweet.
May the hours retreat
when the wild wind moans -
I miss you, dear sweet,
deep in my bones.

I awoke,
I understood,
I took in the meaning of it,
the meaning of your right foot
victorious over your left,
The Cairo perched above Q street,
the creak of my knee on the stair.

I was awake,
I saw it all,
the piles of fog like white
mattresses after the rain,
the scent of tobacco in the night
after the screech of madness,
the too-proper-by-half letters
I received from you...

I am waking,
I am open to it,
to the secrets that you tell
on a night when you are drunk,
to the wells in your eyes,
to the way you hold a pen
when you are telling me
goodbye.

Your halo combs
through the steam
trellis.  Old sprays
of Baltimore sugar
fan across the table
by a salt whisper.
The white steeple
of creamer with red
lamassu prowling
anchors the coffee
shop's Tuesday
crucible. I drink
mine cold as you
sketch the bustle.
When I leave for
the office, your art
eye is still tight
as a lens, amid
the brunette shots
of night-hearted
espresso, the cluck
of the businessmen,
and the steam tree
that wakes you away.

Sweet woman with black hair
your life is electric
intelligence floods your eyes.
When you laugh for me
your smile washes the world.

Getting closer to you
by breath and romance
like in a storybook.
I'm writing you this poem late at night
while even my candle is asleep.


Siyah saçlı tatlı kadın
senin hayatın elektrik
zeka gözlerinizi doldurur.
Benim için güldüğünde
gülüşün dünyayı yıkar.

Sana yakınlaşmak
nefes ve romantizmle
bir hikaye kitabındaki gibi.
Sana bu şiiri gece geç saatlerde yazıyorum
mumum bile uyurken.

i.
Sew the sun
into you.
Let them
all complain
about your
radiance.

ii.
The sun
replaces
your heart.
Let them
try to break
it now.

iii.
The sun
is plural,
doubled
in your eyes.
Let them
worry about
the yellows.

iv.
Chew the sun
in the evening.
Let them
moan about
the bite marks.

v.
Fold the sun
into your poems
like a blind seed.
Let them
grow anxious
as the words come.

vi.
The sun shines
on the Seven
Hour City.
Let them
find it,
if they can.

vii.
Rescue the sun
from the brown
shackles of
cloud.
Let them
shield their
rain-dimmed
eyes in
surprise.

viii.
Hide the
sun in
a dune.
Let them
discover
night.

xi.
The family
of the sun
comes to
visit you.
Spread
the table
wide.
Let them
all peek
through
the windows.

x.
You
& and
the sun
strut in
the sky.
Let them
watch and
cry about
the arrogance.

(After Lorca)

In the cloudy evening,
I was a heart, a heart.

I was ripe with song
when I was breaking.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

In the sleepless morning,
I was still myself, a heart.

The evening was ripe
with my voice, a song.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

Dad's college
favorite, he
screened it
for me in
the leaning
half-house
he rented.

The camera tilts,
searching for god,
finding only the
empty parentheses
of clouds, the iron
silence of ovens.
Famously,
the knight plays
chess against death -
god may be quiet,
but death is happy
enough to chat.

At the end,
the unbroken
line of the dead
dances up the hill,
inscrutable.
My dad drinks
bourbon from a
coffee cup,
old wet sting,
his thoughts
pulled in
like oars.

Night, craftsman of lies,
crazy, imaginative, chimerical,
what do you show to the one
     who conquers the good in you?
the flat mountains and dry seas;

inhabitant of empty brains,
mechanic, philosopher, alchemist,
vile concealer, blind lynx,
afraid of your own echoes:

the shadow, the fear,
     the evil you are known by,
caring, poetic, sick, cold,
brave hands and fleeing feet.

Awake or asleep,
     half of my life belongs to you:
awake, I pay you with the day,
asleep, I don't feel what I live.

Black crash
pillow's face,
twilled to
the old nightmare.

Ironic that
the child who
spent years
fighting
the father
who left,
the mother
who curled,
ended up
divorcing
year after year.

This night
shone with
shedded
skin. I
walked away.
The moon
was pregnant
with an
airless sea.

I woke from
all of this
feeling like
a wreck
that might
be saved
by you,

but the miles
between us
argue so
persuasively.