In Dublin in December I sat
on a shore bench in Sandymount

& watched thunderheads strut
on stork legs of raking rain while

bullish boats trundled through
with taut cheeks sobbed with rime.

My heart was full of weeks of doubt,
I'd flown in on a night plane

aching with the knowing
that something was badly turned,

distance could no longer be borne,
all the miles within and without.

We drank, coupled, and confessed
through long, long nights as outside

the high open window the stars
sloughed their waffling shine into

the many arms of the river, and gulls
eavesdropped on desperate sins.

By day she showed me her city
of castles and secret gardens,

elephant bones and electric trees,
& quietly urged me to join her.

As we crossed Beckett bridge
to seek troubled love on her couch

we pierced a cold and hanging fog,
prehaunted by the loss that followed.

Swan swing or harp bridge,
by sunrise's purple finger
inside the azure waist.

City wakes broadcasting
red trees, shining pyramids,
vivid blossoms and vines.

The river's garbled mirror
under paint-crane chaperone
soon shows cerulean Christmas.

By the time hips of light
coalesce in the near-dawn,
you're gone - long since home.

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.

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.

Once upon a time, I scratched out
verses in dozens to a girl over the sea -
O, I was no naif, two divorces

had cooked me down to syrup,  
my heart was leather-withered,
wary of wonderlands and Technicolor.

Yet I held faith that love might
be the blossom and not the vine -
even as she closed her interior doors,

even as we came rapidly to zugzwang.
In a broken green betrayal
I watched Dix Pour Cent for hours,

tried to sell away the lonely murk,
trade inconstant moon for steady sun,
Akhenaten in a third-floor studio

for two and half years of sag and salt.
But as often happens time and chance
hewed new love and now I sit with her

in a tiny theater to see Romeo and Juliet;
Romeo just took four shots of rail whisky
to the delight of the wet blurry mouths

that roar from clay-thick shadows
beyond the clutch-cloth footlight fringe.
After the lovers die in stony Verona

we leave and somehow end up at Stan's,
a bricky subterrestrial parlor where
with cocktails we thresh from our heads

the melancholy of a troubled world:
sirens mourn the mauveness of evening
& clouds are killed, ripped to wisp.

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.

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.

Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.

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.

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 moon
is an anise thigh,
a frostling,
a silver galleon
with trimmed sail.

You are two hours
farther down the arc,
in a mountain-head,
in a waltz-walk,
in a sunroom
that the moon
has colonized.

Oh, the moon...
anise eye,
snow-wreath,
starched breast
aboard a silver galleon.

A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.
My puffball proud,
a valiant cloud
has been our shroud
against this fire spun.
A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.

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.

The sun sluices in -
the light just won't
stop breaking.
Birds are weeping
in trees full of dawn,
& poets run to the streets
to scribble out a heart.
The sun pulls away
from a neck of night.

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.

Clouds in ginger
crowd the skin
& months grow out
while I become
an eschewing hermit
who rerolls nights.
Over in your
farther morning,
flight TK 1977
is sleeking to Dublin
on the same
bronzy sun that
sings in brick.

I've felt far
from you, lately -
distance deepens
in the swaying spaces
between your words.
Splitting goodnights
with a lonely axe,
I let my mind
run away with me.
Please, be here soon -
the moon is but
a sobbing blotch,
& the grass is dying
in its bed.

"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.

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.

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

My eye drowns
with envy in
your clean kõlsch.

Neither of us
speak a word
about marriage.

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.

When I was ten I stepped on a honey bee
resting in the gravel, it stung me and died

& in that moment I tried to bargain with death,
I said I will **** no more bees and in return

I too will not die. Death said nothing, of course,
he, or she, or it, was quiet as an elm or a shingle,

as the millionfold language of the grass.
I imagined assent but now, looking back,

I realize that nothing was finalized,
we never shook on the deal. No, the bee died

on my bare foot, defending itself against
a strange olive hide that blotted the sun.

Three and a half decades later I perch here
in my tower, my brain congested

with depressions, my heart a fallen fog,
my hands ache strangely and my legs tire -

perhaps the best I can manage is to further
the stoic philosophy of the slaughtered bee:

sometimes the best you can do is to slow
a shadow that's more real than the object.

Voices beyond
the window
promise rain
after dark.  

The sun hasn't
moved for days,
caught in a net
of ash.

Father's Day
caught me
off guard -
I find one
of his books,
just stand there
holding it.

Something catches
in the chest.
The dark breaks.

I think, softly,
Where are you?

Rain begins
stretching slowly.

The cloud pulls apart,
a two-headed ripple
in a towering sepulcher
blue as a peacock.
I am a witness,
possibly the only one,
to this bright death.
This, then, is the memorial
of something that lived
as a waver in the upmost field
for just a few minutes,
slain by the unfaithful breeze.

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.

Drink with me,
at the Mexican restaurant
on the wharf that serves
mezcal with chili salt,
we'll talk about all the things
no one wants to talk about.  
The lost loves, the harsh
self-treatment, the way
you're recovering nicely.
I'll share oysters,
but I'll leave soon,
my mind full of her,
full of her, full of her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I am gone, the cat settles in
by the door, among the shoes,
guaranteed to see me first
when I've returned.

When you are away too long,
(& you have been away so long)
I dig in among all our words,
waiting for the sound of keys.

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.

(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.

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 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.

The Lyft
driver
looked
almost
exactly like
Post Malone.

He talked
for a
while
until he
realized
I was
choking
up,
spending
my last
efforts
keeping it
together.

When he
pulled over
I lost it.

"Hey man
it's cool, are you
OK?

I've been
there
it's going to be
alright.

Girl?
Yeah.

Hey man,
cry it out,
gotta get it out.

I'll get you home."

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

Lace curtains
of merlot
down the side
of my glass -
I saw that color earlier
in the fold of a
Madonna's gown.
I'll see it again,
when I close my eyes.

Blame the
wine for dreams
that fold into
forms. Blame it
for another salvo
of mistakes.  
In the seven hours
between us, I have
somehow found
every wrong step.

The carousel
of your voice...
It lifts me all
the way home.

My hands ache
with emptiness,
they are so used
to holding yours.

I hear our music,
set to the drum
of the rain. These
are the lyrics.

I am forever
fifteen with you,
I am under a spell,
I use sails of night

to come reach you
in dreams. You are
a gift. For you,
I poach eggs.

In this odd world
of valentines and
pine cones, you
are the heart of me.

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.

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.

The suicidal hospital
floats away
into the past -
paper gowns
& abject beeps
& red-eyed
streetlamps
all turn into
valentines,
sugar silhouettes.

Being kicked
in my unfaithful face
while donating
my guts to the john
after too much
goodbye tequila?
Gone like a skip -
take a pattern
from my
better thoughts
& drag the
needle across
until I only
remember the yard
where I ate grass
& the air
was cruising
with the perfume
of hyacinths.

The woman who
left her ball gown
on the hook
behind my door
for months
after we fell apart?
No, keep her,
let her stay.
I need the bitter
to remind me
what the sweet is.

The broken symmetries
of the night...
You move,
I move.

You were in the green hill,
chatting with clouds;
I kept a bar open,
wrote you a ditty.

There are little rainings
everywhere tonight.
They slip down into the graves
across the street. It sets the mood.

But I need to get out,
walk the block,
shake this umbilical glass,
join a blind fog.

The moon threatens
to escape its sweater
of noctilucent cloud,
but we're not looking.

I was young, my hair
    covered my forehead.
I picked flowers,
    played by the door.

You were riding
    a bamboo horse,
jousting with plums
    among the benches.

We lived in Changgan,
    without dislike or suspicion.
I became your wife at 14,
    I was shy and unsmiling,

I felt walled-in, and I refused
    every one of your calls.
But at 15, I found myself laughing.
    I even willed our ashes together.

Now I was drowning, even
    as I threw my eyes to you.
By 16, you had traveled
    through gorges filled with rivers.

I heard nothing for five months,
    and monkeys cried from the sky.
Your footsteps by the door
    slowly filled with moss

too thick to sweep, and leaves
    dash away in autumn winds.
In August, yellowed butterflies
    arrive in pairs to the salt grass.

It hurts my heart to watch it.
    I can feel myself aging.
But sooner or later you must descend
    back through the river gorge.

Please write before you do -
    I will come and meet you
all the way by
    Long Wind Beach.

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.

In January, sleep packed
its suitcase and left out the window.

I patrolled the rooms,
waiting for it to return.

I became friends
with the **** tin moon,

I found leaves of tears
inside pillow cases,

I sat with a flowering aloe.
Nothing brought sleep back,

not even the song I found
along my body in the broken bath,

not the poems that dripped
from my fingers after washing

with charcoal, not even
the green prayer of the couch.  

It was only when I rejected sleep
that it returned with laughter in its hand.

In the shadow of the Cairo
(yellow-bodied, stony-crowned,

its high and untroubled brow
gazing over our fleeting forms

as we scamper to small habits)
I think of you O love, though

(rain heads are drifting east
in humid fists of fat vapor,

air hangs in cloying squares)
the city is all alcoholic laughter.

Or maybe that's me projecting
(I grew up in the green country,

among corn and dairy, my room
stocked with books and song,

but after my first divorce I collapsed
into a city that teemed

with friendly drink and helped me
forget the father who left me,

the mother who didn't care,
the sweethearts who danced away,

the friends who faded, the fires
that swallowed me whole).

Now it's a hundred and change
in the shade of the Cairo and I think

of you, sweet love. This yellow king
sweeps a wide view over the bake

of the block, and I wander down
to finish your teal. (I'm alone,

always alone, but with you
I'm a little less aware of it).

Stay with me - touch me -
remind me that I'm still alive.

There is no night
                 without your name.
The day suffers too,
but limps along
on a swan's wing.

There is still much
                 to do
before you fly in,
but if we need anything,
it's ours.

When I ask
                 how you've been
write me a book -
your hours
are always new.

So give me that
                 laughing look,
for I belong
only to you -
there is no night
                 without your name.

Blue letters of rain
are waiting...
Reticent molecules,
why are they
unable to pierce
the gauzy tent
that's vaulted up there,
gray and sick?
Caught by the elbow
on the way out the door,
living in a cloud's foyer -
don't they see
my hands moving,
filled with keys?
What silver seed
are they waiting for now?
Blue letters of rain,
sleeping in a sky
dark as a bandage,
the air is so heavy,
so metallic; the whole
city is waiting
for this wet birth...

I walk at night
just to walk.
By dim streetlight
I walk at night.
From city's height
to the river dock -
I walk at night
just to walk.