I was thinking of you,
watching green oxide stone
resist the rain
on a broken Sunday
when the groins of trees
trembled in the breeze,
& the sky lacked
all confidence,
five days until
the metal snout
carried me off,
away from a dawn yard
of bread brick, and
towards the one-wing bridge
& your greenest wave.

Evening yellow,
sun purple plum.
I'm grieving your
absence under
sheet cloud.
Trumpets of night
are moaning,
tomorrow molten.
Kansas Avenue
collapsed into the
center of the earth,
but it's alright.
Here is the Bible
Study school, here
a slip of children,
here is the parish
of weeds binding
corner green.
Everything seems
assembled for you:
you've changed me.

White tongue of ginger,
black tongue of coffee,
& morning limps in
at 6 a.m., hiding between
the pages of blue books.
I'm under a memorial,
across five meridians,
fifty-five hundred kilometers.
My hands hope to drift
under the knit peach,
& I love you with both lips.
White tongue of lemon,
black tongue of cardamom.

I'm alone in my room.
There is a green-skinned lamp
casting a level wave
onto an orange cat.

Bourbon, on the rocks,
waits in a shallow brown shadow.
The open window
is a breezy mumble.  

Peerless girl,
come inhabit all the sweet spaces
of my slowest imagining
with your light and wild step.

I love you,
my dear.
I tell it true:
I love you
every day anew.
Let them all hear:
I love you,
my dear.

Orange buttons
of repetitive sun
crush up against
thin folded dresses
of blued cloud:
You send me
earnest self-portraits
& my cantilevered
eye is oh-so-yours.

The sunset strides
one more chestnut
step, and I remember
how you laughed
when your shirt
parted for my
tickling hand:
even the moon
was up on its toes
hoping to see
the bright heave
& glow of your skin.

Shavings of cloud
drop like cut hair
and brush my face.

Snow is plowed,
the street is flayed
and thrown with salt.

District sleet is like lace,
a wet veil, a noose,
more not there than there.

There's a grave in the air,
it's filled with my father.
My heart turns to water,

it just breaks loose -
it's nobody's fault.

You're gone again -
what should I expect?

The day breaks
& the flowers
are frozen
like enamel.

The morning shrug
of sun eats
my resolve entirely.

But what do I expect?
Your life is other steps
& I'm sentimental
if I think otherwise.

What do I need
from you?

I'll step back -
unsustained,
unfulfilled,
but patient.

The falsetto
"no no no"
shot down
the steepled
maple *****
into the walking line
by the metro.

How someone
got up there
we never knew, or
what made them yell.

I remember only
that the sky
was littered
with the wrecks
of clouds, and
it was a Friday
in winter.

We all stopped,
though we
saw nothing,
& then
it was over.

The grass
waved away
the watery
minutes,
& the sun
rolled loose
among the wrecks
in the blue ditch.

So we towered
over red tile
on the metro
platform,
hands heavy
with phones,
until the train
obliterated us
with its urgency.

The sea slides
away. Fog
banks the high
tide and lakes
wrap the
highway.

You are the
specter in
my mind.
Garnet
laughter
rings out
in the house
of sand -
it's yours.

I stay up
late, branded
with sea.
I think you
are the grace
of the world.
The beach
swerves into
umber mist,
& an absent sun
hums just below
the horizon.

Without you,
the night-walk
is so hollow.
Without you,
the cigarettes
burn in rooms
of rain.
Without you,
the shells
are striped
with longing.
My balcony
heart perches
above the salt
city.

How many
days will
the fog bank
the high tide
& lakes wrap
the highway?
How long
will the sea
slide away?

Lay a shadow on me -
we sleep overlapped
with the night-bells,
the thieves in the pines,
the crescent wine,
mothers-of-pearl.

Lay a shadow on me -
your sun's waist
rises while my dreams
are still marching
across my forehead.

We are unfit
for these lives
as we lead them;
betrayed, moon-sick,
palmfuls of our pills
getting washed down
with the cheap wine
we hide under the sinks;
even the streets
are depressed
under the vinyl sun
with a lion's mane
of cloud, anxious
in the passing;
I don't know
what life I would shape
for you to make you happy,
but it wouldn't look
anything like this one.

There is a line
from me to you.
It straddles
the salt **** of sea,
the starry marrow
of night air,
the pencil shavings
about your ankles.
It threads through
castles of romance
I built in another time,
the courtyard littered
with lost scarves.
The line spans
thousands of girdled
miles without effort,
yet it touches you
questioningly,
and lays down
like a stray cat.
Go ahead,
it's yours,
take it.

I stand here,
cut from flight,
shaped by love.
You hold branches
of mulled wine
by the black milk river.
The blue and gold
of your soul
nestles in the sleep
of my eye.

She lives on the verge
of a wood where the shy deer stand in
raining glades, and sunken trees
unroll knotted shadows in the long
hour of the ******* sunset.

Her face is in my yearbook,
so serious, in the first row
of the literary club group picture.

I'm in the third row
looking stupidly away
from the camera,
missing the moment -
could that boy in the photo
call out over twenty years and say
"The fists of rain, the speckled deer,
the branching, shaded fog peeling
away as the dogs run in the morning -
these things are yours, yours, yours"?

Hold my hand,
and don't let go.
Heart's demand,
hold my hand,
something grand,
sweet hello.
Hold my hand,
and don't let go.

On this red rug
the memories come:
the driving angels of meat,
the ocean yanked
around by the cue-moon,
the antler of sleep
that hummed past,  
the bar-room mystery
that was never solved
on a cold night when I
was about twenty-five.

Someday all of these
memories will fall away
into the crevasse
of my death.

Until then, all I can do
is bring them here
and give them to you -
as an offering,
as a plea.

I keep my visions
to myself.
You never approved.
The day leaks
onto the tusks of night,
the night tries itself out
onto the street of day.
Visions drift away
into the closer hills.
You never approved.

The stars all come out at once,
like whipping a sheet off a bed.

A crowd of silver
floats in the moon's broth,

& approaching apples of light
break away from the black hoof,

the flooding vein,
ten thousand irises.

There are those children
out your window again,
but I'm trapped over the line
in the seething yellow dusk.

I count the gapped lintels
the next building over,
count to ten, twenty,
it doesn't stand.

I take up post
by the oven to hear
your anger at those children,
those ****** children.

Watching a **** elm tree
on your birthday,
as it bends and whistles
to inaugurate the afternoon.
The grasses bend south,
& birds make silent shadows
up and down the street.

Restless, I stand up,
roam around the apartment:
your birthday carries the odor
of fig soap, or maybe it's plums -
I can't recall. I pick up books
of poetry, put them down,
pick them up again,
turn on the stove, make coffee,
and wave it at the naked elm
to salute you on this day of yours.

This day - so clear,
so empty: you must fill it.

You sent me a picture
of buildings wreathed
in Christmas lights,
shaming my city.
Maybe you are right -
& Dublin is the one?
Maybe I will walk there,
under the vacancies
between stars, under
the wounded moon,
under the aching
Christmas lights,
& be at peace.

Young men in glazy unison
wreck over lipstick shoals

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

& pony up for a last fist
of foaming heart.

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

with germanium on/off eyes,
surrounded by ten brave

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

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

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

The last shadow will close my eyes
     and take the white day from me,
and unbind my soul from lies and flattery
     so that it can find its way;

but my soul won't leave its memory
     of love there on the shore where it burned:
the flame that swims cold waters
     and has no respect for the severest laws.

My soul, that a god made a prison for,
my veins, that have braided fire,
my marrow, which scorched in glory,

will leave this body but not this desire;
they will be ash, but that ash will feel.
They will be dust, but that dust will love.

I  always want you
to know who I am.
When the driving pink days
collapse into anxiety,
& the restless fountain nights
flood the streets
with gray shadows,
there I am, over the keys,
writing to you.
I'm the one who gives you -
across the sea, star to star -
something that you and
you alone can redeem.

I know that
you can never love me.

But even so,
the glove of evening
slides off as you approach.

So many have tried
this comb - and now you,
the man on the horse.

My lips starve to feel
more than the air
around the sound of your name.

Crinkles of steam
unfold from my golden coffee
into pyramids of air.

Just beyond, the television
radiates in rectangles
of submission.

3000 miles away, you sit
in your pajamas, watching
with me, linked.

Everything is sending signals,
if you know how to look.

I'm watching
a day rain
that moves
so immensely -  
heaven's wet
mile, spans
& masses
of gray.

It can be
measured.
Yet there
is no tool,
no machine
to measure
the width of
this love.

"To find a kiss of yours,"
Lorca wrote,
"What would I give?"

The sediment of the sun
isn't enough, stumbling
into cobbled alleys,
getting lost in bookstores.

& the wing of moon
just multiplies into the earth
with gutters of shadow,
forging letters to old lovers.

The tides of the air are fading
on this churlish Sunday,
yet still I haven't found
what I would give for your kiss -

A little hand of silver?
Every third breath?
My best and hidden whisky?
My heart's speakeasy password?
My giant white and silver painting?
A green wing of evening?
This poem?

I dreamed about
runaway horses
dragging the shadows
of early winter through the field.

I dreamed about first snow
falling today in the wood,
collecting in little pockets,
gathering in the grass.

I dreamed you held my hand
through all of it, breath
hanging in the chill.
The two of us, watching

wild hooves stamp and
kick through new snow -
I dreamed of love,
I dreamed of distance.

The cat makes her bed
as constitutions of sleep
overcome her.
The day peels back
in pieces like an orange
revealing the sweet
flesh of sleep.
In the weave of day,
the cat finds a bed
in an old leather chair,
triples of sleep.

I'm burning beside you,
trying to quiet
my hurt mouth-sounds.

Get up and search for honey
in the back of the cabinet,
cursing all the while.

Is this one of those
moments when someone
is about to leave me,

gathering their things
& inching toward
the proverbial door?

Go outside - count stars -
have a panic attack -
breathe, breathe -

catch fire and burn.
If I make it to bedtime,
it'll be a mercy.

Once, I thought
I had an empire,
full of ecstasies of grass,
temples to an obese sun,
words signed away
into the last corners
of the brickish night.

I had such grand plans,
to put death to death,
but soon all the heavens
of love coagulated.
Ghosts without eyelids
or lips followed me,
registering each sin.
An owl scratched at the moon.

This was the state you found me in -
I staggered around, alone,
scratching out my brutish art.
For you, though, I combed my soul
& yielded to the burning mercies
you offered among the knees of trees.
You cured me with sugar and patience;
I lived in your eyes.

I am your own poet, now,
lacing you into my middle age,
howling at this strange gamble
that closed a distance,
& falling into your arms
as often as possible.

I say your name
over and over,
spiced petals
of a sea rose.

The moon has already plunged
into the alley by my window,
& the stars are scraping away
with milky fingers.

It's a night for names.
I find them on green walls,
in cups of green wine,
across greenish clouds.

I say your name
over and over,
like collecting sea roses
with both hands.

Come see the dead clocks,
between the blocks of sickness
& the giant silent ****.
You must remember
what you gave me,
that last coarse night
when we were so hungry -
bring it with you,
even if it's raining.

Thinking of you -
the night caress,
the black lip flower,
the water hall.

Sleep won't come -
only the quiet wait
until the soft white
hoof of morning.

But I'll mail these
little ponds of thought
to your bed, in case
it softens your eye.

A club of sun
down Upshur St
breaks our talk
of pink noise.

Interrupted quilts
of cloud are shyly
unlaced in the stillness
of the afternoon.

I turn your face
toward the green
tunnel of park,
but you're not looking.

I.

The washing moon
over evergreens
plucks needling rain:
unsleeping, you rise
& flip through a few pages
although your mind
anchors elsewhere.

II.

Driving home,
you see small birds
whipping into the afternoon
on the line to green,
although your mind
has turned inward
like the stone in a cherry.

My eye's choir
garbles the sway
swung from your sun's
dying orange angle.

Yes, Saturn's higher
on the belted tray
of stars, softly done:
we're entangled,

you and I.
If I'm a bird,
you're the wings,

though your thighs
eat all my words,
in their long dark strings.

Come and cure me,
if you can,
vertical man:

there's ice in the glass,
& rain-blacked grass,
as if by plan,

& a loosened sea
is a sad blue band -
this horizontal man

needs your cure,
Dr. A'Bunadh,
so don't detour.

Talk to you
soon, by the river;
forgive me.

Or don't -
either way the children
will carry cheap burning sticks
around the August night.

I'm always being born -
even this morning,
when I was thinking
too hard about it,
curing myself at 8:30
with scotch that reeked
of dense iodine
until a bray of laughter
became a choke
as I returned to the scene
of the ******,
pushing a belly of snow
back into the past;

I'm always being born,
blinking in surprise,
drawing this breath,
instinctively turning to you.

I had a father
bandaged with
quiet. And so
I also tasted
that silent
gauze.

I had a mother
drunk with
self-regard,
stumbling feeling
to feeling.
& so I felt
everything
enormously.

It took so long
to find balance.
I carved a voice
from white marble.
I opened my hands
and let things
escape.

It's not about
the damage,
it's the long
walk back.

The leaf drifts
to a green grave.

The soft run of sun
spreads red in the hand.

Angles descend
white into bronze.

Where are you?
You break my symmetry.

All these engravings
in a wing-wax afternoon

are hollow
in your persistent absence.

You are
so far:
if I tell you
that small green
throbs of ice have
formed night
colonies in the
fir needles,

& that horns
wail car to car,
crying out
for you,
"Where did you go?"

you'll just have
to believe
my reports.

But when
I turn off
this lamp,
and the shadow
snaps from
my hand,
up across
the wall
into the dark -

love,
when you rise
this morning,
that sweet shadow
that slips through
your teeth
was mine.

The lowest pine branch
bows its head just above  
where we buried our names
on that day in May.

The air was sweet
with anise, and the wind
through the pine boughs
sounded like the sea.

I want to dig up our names,
I want to push aside
the needled thigh of pine
& bite ***** into mulch.

I want to remember
that day in May
when we buried our histories
in a drum of gelato.

Oyster shells of light
peer through the Y
in a bare tree.

Night has moved on
to California or somewhere
out on the ocean.

But the new day, it aches,
the grass drowns in dew.
I see my loved one

in a week, and until then
I am getting a little tired
of clouds burning like sugar.

The wound only shows
when the body is sleeping,
in the mind, in the nightmare
where ink drops from the desk
& splashes across the floor
in the shape of his face
though he's been dead
for years. It's a blow,
a reminder of the grave
in the air: this wound
never closes, there is no scar,
& sometimes no memory
when the nightmare closes
itself as a raven's wing,
more black ink folding in.

The wound only shows
when the body is sleeping,
so coffee is the sword
& the shield.
Keep sleep short,
don't dream,
& don't think about it,
just sit still, read
the newspaper you stole
from the building's front step.
The Dow is down,
but tech stocks are climbing.

I agree to reveal a secret
in a sonnet, Inez, my beautiful enemy;
but no matter how well I set it up,
it cannot be in the first quatrain.

Here, come to the second: I promise you
that the secret won't slip without my telling you;
but I'll be ******, Inez,
if eight lines of this sonnet haven't already gone.

See, Inez, how hard life is!
With the sonnet already in my mouth
and every last detail planned,

I counted each line and have found
that according to the rules by which a sonnet plays,
this sonnet, Inez, is already finished.

Wide dollars of summer thunder
brush the early night.
I've messaged you: no reply yet.

The cloud-curtain births
small violent flags of rain
that waver and fall limp
into the hot gray of the street.  

I'll have no part of it -
instead I'll work on my map
of your thoughts that I started
years ago, even before you knew.