Did she end it?
As I'm thinking,
a weight
of night
slips into me.

I don't know
where I stand,
exactly, but
at least
I don't leave

wanting to drink
this old grief
in gulps that
leave no room
for air,

like those
other times.
No one answers
my texts.
What did

those words mean?
The driver
talks on
about the night,
but has no idea

that I'm in
his backseat
eating the night
and dying.
Yes I know

I'm difficult,
is that what
happened?
Is that
what happened?

I.
The tattoo needle
feels like
it's sinking
to scrimshaw
bone.

II.
These words
you say
are sinking
to char
marrow.

I drank deep
of the
pink heads.

I let the
whiteness
of the petal
shake my
face from
the day.

The wind
came cold
from the
basin,
sweeping
my hair
into
dusk
shapes.

The jealous
magnolia
branch,
heavy with
wax,
was drunk
with ascendance.

In all of this
I felt the
wildness
crawling
in me.

It longed
for you.
When I drank
deep of
the pink
heads -
I thought
only of
your name.

She reminds me
of old, painful
geometries.

Her close-grained
rasp and enchanted,
pierced warble -
a close kiss
& a hammer.

"Some days
all you need
is one good
thought, strong
in your mind."

Her voice
is Orpheus,
looking back,
is Ophelia,
on the willow
branch.

It shakes
dullness from
the soul, the
way you clean
a coin
with salt.

It's around noon
& snow softens
to white puddles
in the street.

I'm standing
at 7th and Penn
& to the south
is a memory,
just a shape
in the air,
bent by a tree,
a little car,
a piece of lawn.

To the north is
what they now call
Chinatown,
where spelling
"*******" in
Chinese characters
is enough
to qualify.

There's no gloss
on the water.
Winter wets
my feet
in gray laps.
I still have
errands to do.

The life and
death of it -
Four thousand
years of relics
confront me as
memento mori:
glazed plate,
wine cup,
& garland of
jasmine blossoms.
Every hand
that knew
these is dust.

But in another
breath I'm in
my head, where
you are an
archaeologist,
recovering each
of these priceless
things: from under
far hill, in a copse
shaped like an "X,"
in meadows that
seem innocent,
but dig and gold
shines the eye.

Bronze after bronze
after bronze -
all yours. It's so easy
to see how this could
have been you -
hunting history
down to the bones.

Astrolabe,
book of jade,
turquoise drake
curling and curling.
They are all two
things at once:

They speak
the mortal voice
directly to my
deepest ear.
They are also
symbols of a
version of you
I see so easily -
in love with
the past, eager to
find it, wherever it
might be, unearth it
& swallow it whole.

"If I cannot bend the will of heaven,
I shall move hell."

Meadows of blood
are sluicing from my arm,

& courts of lithium
are bottled neatly.

This stream within me,
the red subliminal, latent,

needs beating back.
The noon sun kicks uselessly.

Something happened,
it had nothing to do with me,

it had nothing to do with
quiet cancerous woe,

nothing to do with the
underside of my mind.

I am quiet in the chair,
the blood-taker smiles at me

through alcohol bouquet,
compliments a yielding vein;

the blood pours and pours,
aching with subconscious.

An incomplete face
in its glass slab,
pulls a distance over me.
Mournful, I watch the neighbors
streaming down the toothy walk
in black and brown coats,
their laundry massed  
on shoulder tilt,
or in little onion cart.
They are all right here,
in this winter identity.
Washington accepts them.
If they should crane
& launch a coup d'œil
into this hunched pane
they'll know I am not of them;  
what body I have
stalls on this laminate -
the black fume
behind fastened eye
has already bolted
to keels of poetry
across furrowed Atlantic:
completing a glass face.

Look, up in the clouds
full of black horizontals;
a night is born

in little dawdles,
in brown day bank gasps,
earliest stars bowling to break.

I am here, with you, under it;
planning to grant you
the little pictures

that you so desire.
This chapter belongs
to us; to us.

Look, left of the moon,
by the rain steeples;
a night is born.

Push back black bath of sleep;
I have these 3 am shakes.
I hear the water skin
moving in the next room,
drops of cotton coil to cold leg,
& salt lamp cracks on,
pink broadcast against the hour.
Dreams retreat on the board;
the moon swims in the frost.
Where are you?

A wasp is
singing.
The wet dusk
is coming,
imprint
on the air.
The sun
retreats to
the far side
of the world,
bestowing
the sky to
a pink moon.

Dear Pisces,
I share these
things with you.
I give you
the scent
of rain over
fresh cut grass.
I give you
every cloud
set loose
in the sky.
I give you
the broken
cherry branch
the children
pretended
was a sword.
I give you
the haunting
shadows that
play across
the stoic faces
of houses on
Gallatin Street.

I give you
every word
of my life.  
A prismatic
night mumbles
with new rain,
and clouds
smear vaguely
across a blue city.
Come, be with me
in the middle of it.

I'm trying to tell you
about the life I spent
on the white elm
pin oak hill,
& about all
the manifold
pains there:
a child's mouth
******* tight
from the inside;
& from the outside,
nailed shut.
A death's place,
a Luxor or Karnak -
where the gods
were stony,
& answered
no prayers,
& where
I segregated
my emotions
into neat,
sealed containers,
for some
later life
to come.

Oh, it wasn't
all terrible:
I learned to
drink young,
& the yellow
night was full
of the river
at high water
mark, and I
looked at the stars
through the
bottoms
of bottles.
I found Jesus
at the side
of the road
& drank
through him too.
The blue light
of morning
came day
after day -
why should
it ever end? -
over the
funereal pin oak
& the sad-winged elm
& the tomb-moss
that settled
over my mouth
& my name.

The sun was
merely a function,
& days just
happened to me
& every bad break
confirmed me
as less than
the barest
crooked twig
broken in the yard.

It took years
to turn that back,
to spit away
the wavering blood
that filled my mouth.
It took longer still
to walk out
into my memory
of the green
light night yard
& recover that twig.
That's what
I'm trying to tell you.

I'm a few feet
under the city,
in the cemetery
of the streetcars.
Images celebrating
Stonewall convex
from projectors onto
chilled chamber
of gypsum cement.

I'm here for yoga,
an absolute beginner
with my purple mat,
taking off my shoes
and feeling the rough
floor where the
streetcars were
severed from their
electric milk.
The hour of my
longest spine
is saturated, voices
fed only to me.
My hands slip...
My bones are
symphony.

When the hour's done
I have a new face of salt.
I fold my street of
discovery and shake
the stairs. I climb out
to supermassive clouds,
I feel my shape move,
I'm grateful for you.

The fog loses purchase
on the window
and, dying, wicks
ashy vapor's slick scatter
to gated green-brown.
Morning comes again
in fractioned crooks
of snow declining
into fat eggs of rain.
The fog is a colossus,
ravels with dragging step,
before retiring itself
above oak branchlets.  
The sun wraps away
in gray, as if stolen.  
Nativity of cloud.
I'm telling you this:
everything is possible.

I didn't smoke
but she did.
The orange glow
of the orphan
cigarette in the
ashtray grave
was a neat
counterpoint
to a light
greening rain
that lashed
at the window
in the coffee afternoon.

The moon rose
like ice in the spoon.

I laughed with her
& ate
a throw of sun.
Then I didn't eat
at all,
& grief-starved madly,
rattling the flocks
of my ribs.
I was a charismatic
wreck, secrets
blooming
everywhere,
like stalks
of foxglove.
I'd give you
a blossom
to taste
at your leisure,
but it would
stop your heart.

Saturday night's
rain down
the glass
reminds me of
when the sky
tipped
& beaded
on my face
in the spare
maple as spring
came on.

I laughed
& shook the shine
from my hair
as my fingers
gestured water
into the hillside
streeted
with roots.

I found the road
as the dusk
whistled
& followed it
back to the *****
where headlights
kicked against
the first pierce
of stars.

The rain sat
on the ruddy brick
& glowered.
I sailed
over lawns
black with dousing
& listened
to the drop
and lilt.

My body was against me
even at birth,
trying to strangle me
with my own
umbilical cord.

It kept pulling away.

Sometimes it loaned
itself to a lover,
no matter
my ambivalence.
Or refused itself
to one
I desperately desired.

Sometimes it added
to itself in greed,
and then shed it,
in grief.

I understand
a little more
why my father
filled a coffee mug
with bourbon
every early morning
I spent with him.

The body is quiet
when alcohol speaks.

Pink supernovas
call monarchs to crawl;
poison milk drops from
broken green breast.
Fields flicker with rivers
of afternoon latex.
O fluent wound,
this is a poor man's Lethe.
There are better ways
to forget what happened
than the annihilating
milkweed cripples.

Soft-boiled sun-yolk
spills west, and sill-shadow
splits and spreads
across chestnut slab:
a stillness - someone's missing.

Such perfect lines -
the green smears
of woman on the
right, the blue
river stroke,
long white strings
along the women,
each to each.
Yellow drifts here
& there. Black
in little pools.

It's a horrible
sadness. Are they
scattering ashes?
Was someone
lost at sea? Is the
green woman hiding
tears behind
the seashell fan?
Why is there
such a terrible
sameness of sky
& water and earth?

There is something
awful here. The faces
all turned away
from us. Nature's
straight, the women
bent and twisted,
& the texture -
everything is
coming apart.

Blind, inconstant love:
you rose up and shattered
on me like the burst salt wave
over the night promontory.
I was so unprepared...

And then you receded,
back into the sea, impossible
to differentiate from the rest,
the only traces of you
what remained on me.

Sword lilies
play in the noon.
The spending sun
is a yellow wild.
We drink champagne
for the hell of it,
because and
because.

I carry you
with twining
laughter to
the bedroom.
The sloping thigh
of night, under
a palm moon.

You nestle into the
crook of my arm,
movies play out in
green breath foam.
We drink
paper planes.

We drink gin, too.
The squares of London
skirt your legs
as we dream
with lavender.

You annihilate
with your merest
gesture as we turn
Turkish vinyl.

Cursive stars are
scrawled with
new romance.

We drink champagne
for the hell of it,

because and because.

This morning's cigarette
I bought at the airport in Rome.
It wavers in a cold district
as I question my romances.

Dear cigarette, little acid stub
on a tile, you lived your span
in a long winding fume:
May my own life stick
to her hands like smoke.

The future is ours,
and life is sweet.
Through all the hours
the future is ours,
and all our powers
grow great in May heat...
the future is ours,
and life is sweet.

When Dad died
I had this nightmare
of him standing
by the bedside
ten feet tall
at least
trying to say
something
but the air
only congealed
into a
black paste.

A few of
those dreams
& sleep keeps
its distance.
So I go
running,
not to escape it
there is
no escape
it colonizes
the mind,
but to exhaust
the bones
so old Hymnos
can descend
on his one
charred wing,
and mute
the memory
of Dad
in the
hospital bed,
waxy gasps
collecting
in the air.

Tonight
I run west
with the
gale wind
that rubs
against the slate.
Along the
crannied angles
of the money houses
where windows churn
with the cadmium glow
of happy families.

The invisible gale,
the voiceless flat
slabs of slate.

O tunnel of firs,
tied with rain,
were you watching too,
when my parapet
ate a hock of indigo
at seven, and, still hungry,
gobbled a dull star?
Were you watching
from cold roots,
little grove, when
something unfaithful
happened? A curling lip
received a sacrament
of apple cider vinegar
under clouds of hospital gauze.
O firs, you never tell me anything,
too proud by half in your
gowns of needles.  
That's alright - I'll lay until
the night slips over the line,
and imagine a kind of morning
where I have nothing to tell you either.

Swig and swim in dimming seethe,
plastic cup palomas, beers held
close to chest as voices lap
up steeply to black rafters.
Standing close, I feel you breathe
under my hands, and swell
with music, ribbon-wrapped
in clap and laugh.
These nights, they roll on in wild waves:
we're falling bed into bed,
our touch like breaking bread
before a feast where nothing's saved
for later - not a single bite...
Then day rises cold and wet and white.

Sitting with you in the kitchen
Talking of anything
Drinking tea
I love you
…
Oh I wish you body here
With or without the bearded poem
-Elise Nada Cowen, "Sitting"


Face the firing squad, Evan -
the dowsing rod pierced memorial waters
coiling in the soft morning triangles.

Morning coffee builds browning steam
as I recall the feeling of lips, hungry lips -
ladies of death and water.

The mind is the borderland.
Where does mind go after the body
returns to the ash salt cycle?

Oh, hell - who cares anyway?
Billions of years from now, the sun eats us,
the sun dies and in dying

it eats its children, like the titans did.
There won't be new stars.
Whatever lump of death I become,

will be scattered into the universal zero
way, way before that. But ... my mind?
Does it just shut down, a key turn,

going cold? A message, read once?
A name known to a few, then unknown to all.
I no longer even desire one person like I did -

I just want to connect a few times
before the lazy azure turns black.
Some company in the evenings.  

I know you understand - remember
when someone slowly touched
the inside of your wrist?

"Let me out now please –
Please let me in"

Mehmet II burns
in my hand
while we hunt
the Perseid shower
under a waxing
gibbous moon's white
sea broadcast.
Prosecco disappears
inside us. You pick
deck tomatoes, and
conversation gets
interesting by your knee.

The night doesn't end
so much as folds and
folds again, with us
by the very center.
Sinuous silk birds
crease into sheets
just beyond your
delectable ear.
Your breath
a dark ribbon,
a flower of steam,
a door I step through
on my way to the
kingdom of hands.

Save me,
she writes.
Take me
from here,
everyone is
dead, even
I feel dead.

She reads
his messages
in the dark.
"I'll come
for you,
I promise."

She climbs
for hours,
in the castle
of bone.

"But what
do you look
like?" he asks.
Her heart
turns to water
in her chest.
"Show me,
show me
everything."

She's not surprised,
just disappointed.
She turns away
& steps back into
the black lane.

Another Orpheus
fails the test.

In Reply to Lori Jones McCaffery

"Poetry Challenge 1: One sentence, 17 syllables"

I'm doing a variation and writing a poem consisting of only 17 syllable lines:

Born with everything possible; how disappointing it came to this,

watching dull rain erode the snow from chilled off-white to curb-frozen ash,

drinking old Ardmore and lamenting an ironic philosophy,

Evan's law - as disposable income rises, so do all the bills.


"Poetry Challenge 2: 10 Words - Time, Place, Emotion"

I was thirty-nine in Washington with a Turkish girl:

I chased my feelings for two years until I found

her in bed with someone else. So, to hell with her:

I'd rather get drunk and watch the snow melt.

Morning light skips across
the water like a smooth stone.
Tall bridges coagulate in
memory, colored the
bright yellow of the savanna.
The city swarms with business.
Coins sleep in the fountains.
Rain comes in old surprises.
Noon slips. And soon  
I'm thinking of you again,
sleeping in your green city.
Oh, if I could ride the sun
to your sunrise, throw off
the shining bridle and
kiss you from the
soft grip of dreams!

Night, night...
hammer handle.
Unzip this skin
& spill the salt.
Moon veers to ink
as it dreams
through the screen,
& darkness rides
the blotter.
Clouds cough,
sick over the spot
where you slept.

A gray rain
is slinking down
the sunken crown
of alley lane.
Green-topped church,
I bid goodbye
to your broad thigh,
a mourning perch.
I'll miss the stone
that frames this view
of moon, a bitten scone
against night's broken brew -
you were a hardy bone
that braked my raving blues.

16 miles and change,
26,000 steps
end with the ten
to the absinthe bottle
and back to bed,
dizzy with heartbreak.

I spent years
trying to change,
but I am more myself
than ever before.
The truth slips
over my neck.
My eye is dark.
Absinthe vanishes
from the glass
smooth as vapor.

She invited
my deepest hurts
so I gave them
in cries that
sunk into her
shoulder blade,
more than I've
given to anyone.

Time is a broken floe,
drifting and cold.
I am more myself
than ever before.
I wish I wasn't,
Oh god I wish
I wasn't.

New dose
switches on
around 2 pm.

My mind shrugs
off the shape
of the shadow.

Anxiety's buried
under confident
emerald obelisks.

The day is given
back to me,
engraved.

The slipping sun
is silver,
far away,

& the gloam
is a table
of wet glass.

Think of me,
at your wedding.
With honey and brie,
think of me.
With coffee and tea,
& gifts of silk bedding,
think of me
at your wedding.

The glass stands here
in the lee of the rattle;
the sun's yellow syrup erupts
into this bottle-breeze;
I will signal to you
in the ways you understand;
I will be your silver armor,
your lance and pennant.

Mother hit me
with the cutting
board for years -

until it broke
across my five
year old body.

She's mourned the
board ever since,
apparently it was
a real favorite.

Then she'd chase
me, with her hand
like a mouth, saying

"Alligator, alligator,"
and pinching me
terribly if she
caught me,

laughing,
laughing,
she was
laughing.

Rude, infant cloud,
stamping east -
will you carry
something for me?
Bleachy lump, shroud,
linen's careless crease
in bloodless aerie,
trawl a lyric to quay.
White-headed, bowed
beneath high fleece,
insolent taffy, ferry
over salt-rutted sea:
Take them, these words -
before I ask the birds.

Glowing metal
is taken directly
from a forge
and thrown
into a sea.
The blue
steaming
salt-hiss:
her eye.

"Winter's almost here,"
the wind maintains.
Open all the wine and beer,
winter's almost here
& cold will reign -
"winter's almost here,"
the wind maintains.

Soft as poached yolk,
nightlights dot the Liffey -
you are a snow dream
in a black gallery.

Glossy-budded hair,
unnameably Portuguese,
your hand-picked star anise
floats in my pear sangria.

You are of the moment.
You are a smile and a nose ring.
You seem curious about me,
but you can't be.

Thank you for the swift nothings
of little talk that helped me along
on a Friday afternoon.
You couldn't know it,

but such small items
as bar talk have become, for me,
strange freedoms that bubble up
& sometimes displace the sorrow

that encases me perpetually
on these long spring days.
Your stance between the beer taps,
by the good scotch and gin...

it brings a faint gladness
to an ulcerated gray
that sweeps back westward
across the parapets of new night.

Molten web
of keys
& brass tumble
to the ear;
there's cane
sugar burning,
a thick crest
of moon, the
breast of night,
& the piano
is a violent
love, a brace
of stone.

The second
movement
arrives like
a galleon
with sails
of cries
& whispers.
The world
lilts. A scent
of lilacs
in the
hand. The
minor key
move is
devastating.
"I saw the
figure 5
in gold"

Then,
the dusky
iron of the
anvil births
sparks.
Wistful
lace of
yesterday
falters
in the air.
Trumpet
creepers
climb the
black trellis
of evening.
A closing
throb that
speaks:
It was
worth it.

I knew four or five like him,
loping through the flicker
of the motor oil bonfire,
the tainted, boundless promise
of the devil's ďeal as plain
on their faces as the tattoos.

Always bracing and braced,
like quarry-blown stone
that only seems featureless
until you look enough
to see vein after vein
marbling it.

They are memory men,
resurrected by the news
that Lil Peep is gone,
they still stalk the fringes
of the old bonfires,
some of them consigned
to do so forever,
beer can in one hand,
***** in pocket,
the other hand full
of something, anything,
as long as it filled the hand.

At twenty five
I threw myself
through bonfires,
looking for a
life beyond the
wood smoke angel.

I would drink
a tenth bottle,
& curse the heart
repeating like a
stuck needle
in the black
groove of years.

Past the burning
rye at the edge
of the wood
cars never stopped
moving, white
pulses dropping
into the well of
the far distance,
folding into the
yellow chambers.

I cancelled myself
quietly on the dark
porch corner
in the watery night.

Then a dozen
years were thrown
across my life.

It's not possible
to explain everything.
But know that I
played roulette
with the sun.

I broke the moon
with song
& repaired it
with verse.

I filled my palms
with grass
& drank the
greenness.

I hurt, terribly,
a breaking sleep.
I lived underneath
a residual shine.

And then you,
my ace of cups.

I lay in the
secret rectangle
while you told
me of the snow
brothel.

I watched metal
birds slouch
the sky.

I walked
the theater
of the lawn
and found
you laughing.

Darling,
those years delivered
me to you like a
letter.

If you
unseal me,
everything you
find inside
is yours.

I refused you, heart.
I saw the end parenthesis.

I escaped
the ten year wall.

There was an empty,
starry sting.

I pulled my thoughts in,
raised the sail into the wave.

From every corner
I heard C minor.

O heart, I refused you
& look at me now -

stone-mute, castle-hearted,
dying of it.

The tower climbs
in periodic orange,
lung-like patterns
above the slate run,
casting evening in
long frequencies as
I run the face of
century rows.
A hilted moon cuts
swaths through
clouds of interior
peach, piercing a
gin-muted sky.

Blocks of night
advance across
the blue golf course
& empty highball
glasses clink like
bells in the porch
dark. Broad curves
of street rise in
the humid trees,
then sweep and
glitter toward
the hospital.

Four and a half
miles bring me
to the train station,
under the black
water circuitry.
You arrive in your
night-soaked dress,
walking me home.
The streetlamps
are aching yellow.
Rain never comes.
As a we drift home
I feel so lucky that
all my runs carry
me home to you.
I draw a shower,
& a charcoal horizon
tilts, tilts, tilts.

Moonflower,
sewn through the trellis
with your lemon scent,
breasted nocturne blossom,
your intense distaste for the
bardiche sun that swings
across the high meridians,
how I favor you -

I will be your vambrace,
your cuirass, your sabaton -
your ancient metal shadows
that cool you from
swipe of day,
     my moonflower,
until the short-sleeve
freedoms of night.