My skin's
fever,
your gaze's
brook -

Join me,
even if
to reach me
you must use
the milky way
for stepping
stones.

Each mile is
conspiracy
against us.

Each hour
of division,
is poison that
I am forced
to drink
with you.

You, with
Rapunzel's
tresses,
you are in
poems that
have always
existed.

No matter
how much
I want you
to lay there
and let me
read to you
by the light
of comets,
you can't
hear me.

You are
too far -

My skin's
sun,
your gaze's
moon.

The blood is true
in what it needs,
& what it needs is you.

My blood was blue,
but red it bleeds
if blood is true.

"Please come through,"
my heart's pleads -
what it needs is you.

"Xoxo," your preview.
I don't mislead,
the blood is true.  

My heart's subdued
without you, I concede -
what it needs is you.

We both know what to do,
& soon we will be freed -
The blood is true,
& what it needs is you.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
-Sylvia Plath


because you're often here:
my head is booked with you,

heart wrapped in your worm;
even my feet walk where I do not want to go

thanks to old paths you laid to bone,
invisible, revived by instinct.

Don't get big headed about it -
you know my memory, I recall

every figurine caught in the web.
Many have no names now

& some of the rest are only names.
But unlike most, you're wont to escape

this night scribble brain garden,
percolating into a shapely world.

From time to time I wonder where they go,
all those strange and lovely yous

that leak in photo negative
from my mind's eye with dusky limbs

& that unforgettable voice,
paroled and incessant...

If you are ever out strolling
by your canal where the waters are so still

& so black that the drunks swerve away
& the sodium vapor eyes recoil,

& you hear following steps and look back
& there you are...
                               walk faster.

Out with my ex wife
almost in the old haunts
like the bar where we saw
the Hungarian jazz band
with the wild accordion man,
the same bar where she first said
it was over, all cards were dealt
& it was a losing hand.

Bringing her there,
more angry now
but less burdened,
clearer in that way,
as she coaxes me out
from the silent shell
I wear as habitually
as the old houndstooth coat.

Drink after drink -
coffee, coffee-flavored beer,
just beer by the end -
felt like old times.
Walking the miles,
the benighted embassies,
trying to guess them by flag.
Seeing us, you might almost
believe the night didn't come
& chill us to the bone.

I am the Empire in the last of its decline,
That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass,--the while
Composing indolent acrostics, in a style
Of gold, with languid sunshine dancing in each line. -Paul Verlaine, "Melancholy"


I am the Empire, in decline.
The elm tree is yellowing;
the rain-arm is broadcasting
from the cloud station.

I am the once-loved voice,
now a tired smear of memory;
the ghost of a market thrill,
a bed of smoke, a red register.

I am the Barbarian, grown fat
after the stuttering blonde pyres
are stilled: finger-flickers of ash.
I am the white noise nocturne

after the rerun is over.
I am the cathode ray,
the scent in the glass.
I am the Empire, in decline.

Woe to the world, the sun is in a cloud,
And darksome mists do overrun the day;
In high conceit, is not content allowed;
Favour must die and fancies wear away.
O heavens, what hell! The bands of love are broken,
Nor must a thought of such a thing be spoken.
-Robert Devereaux

Goodbye, mockingbird -
I must leave you now.
I have often watched you
hash across the yard
from your holly station,
chop chop chop with such vim,
from the leaf to the post
to the high-lidded lamp
that surveys the night dispassionately.

In return, how ungrateful I have been -
what terrible things
I have offered your shining bead
of an eye. In your tenure
on the gray-green sill
you have listened to the sharp salt
of my many difficulties
with perfect equanimity.

But now I must go.
Perhaps you will find me,
across the living ruins
of this capital city,
in the raining triangle
that corners down to Dupont.
Or perhaps you will stay sentinel
over this nest, deep in the green.
I will miss you, little bird.
My two brightest years
passed under your wing.

All things
are equal
in length
& distance
from you -
the shyness
of tea steeping,
breezes
drawn off
Maryland's
green-armed
mountain,
night's gin
spill of
light on
the pane -
& don't forget
that I too
am in your
sphere,
more than
shadow,
less than
touch.

I was a knotted shadow,
walking under a bridge
in Dublin, brick water vault
under the grand canal line,
on my way to the coffee shop.

Now I'm a sun-ray, lost to scatter
on the bolt-broad walk,
lost in a carpet cloud,
lost, lost. I'm in another place,
where the wind off the river
tassles the tops of slate roofs
on its way to my corner windows,
a mocking push that carries no salt.

I am sure I will not see it again.
I will go out instead, forward,
out into the alleys and greeneries
& grassworks and cementings,
to find something new
that might replace a wet shadow
full of coffee by the sea.

Alone
In black park of bed
-Elise Nada Cowen


Bedding them, saving them -
(or maybe the reverse?)
it was all the same to me.

All of them, like that;
One liked to wrestle first,
another wanted to be tied down.

Their eyes loosed in the darkness,
swimming at me, sparking
& begging, always begging.

But all of our skins need touching,
all of our faces want remembering.
So I gave them what they needed:

I loved them all with unclouded heart.
Ivy trellises inside me,
but memory is still sterling.

Black park of bed -
yellow crush dawn -
I am the giving snare.

Embers stinging the clouds,
soot settling on a line -

black flake rain
is stirring.

Here is a new sleep,
where I find myself.

Laying in the cascade,
the phone's young flood

assembles your hair -
I'm reminded of my flight

across the salt,
to the place where you are.

This city's graved flecks
are forgotten; I've left them

for a green kingdom
in another pattern.

We
laughed
& it was
nighttime.
That was
only
the first
part.

The
perfect
row
of your
hair
& your
easy
head-thrown
smile
was the
second
part.

The tour
through
the
house of
questions
& the
gilded
sea
was the
third
part.

One
call
& 3,379
miles
were
rescinded,
their
power
extinguished
by the
eyes in
cameras.

Your
heart,
beautiful
heart,
was the
final
act of
magic.

Red choir,
brave
& vulnerable
ache,
apple
of grace,
lilac
shadow -
draw
me in
& hold me.

I speak
& dice
roll on
my tongue.

I move
to kiss
you
& my
mouth
is filled
with
sevens,
sevens,
sevens.

My
white
jag
of
heartbeat
on the
panorama
wall,

scrawled
like
a stock
market,
or
lightning.

Strange
thoughts
moved
through
me in
that
swerving
jetty of
blood
slip:

I kept
saying
your
name,
as if
the air
would
part
at the
seams
& reveal
you,

& when
I went
outside
my
pulse
splayed
itself
across
the lawn.

I read
a tedious
novel
of sun,
while
around
me
families
carouseled
with
lovers.

I felt
like my
heartbeat
remained
visible
to all
of them,
that they
all
saw it
taken
from
the
museum
wall
by
careful
curators
and
presented
to you.

You draw the world
in front of you.
Hand's careful curl,
you draw the world
with eyes unfurled,
coffee like morning dew,
you draw the world
in front of you.

While her plane taxied,
I had already entered a sort

of personal sarcaphogus,
built to contain the click

click click of this radiation -
errant atoms in caustic traces

throughout the salted air.
It's a mechanism, keeping

me sane in the face of
this sorrow of her exit -

I walk in dazes, and joy
falls away in strips

like bark from a sickly tree.
So I count the minutes of the days...

Afternoon's eclipse
a sea of eager eyeless
reborn to the shade.

I was a thin child
playing in the backyard
in February of 1989,
when I was called inside
& readied for the funeral
of my first cousin, once removed.

For many years
I remembered it
being a cicada year.
but my memory was wrong:
1987 was the year
I put my hand to a tree
& accepted a sleeve
of placid red eyes.
I also thought
there were leaves falling,
but that too was wrong:
by February, they were
fine brown powder.

The family gathered at Arlington,
I stood stiff in my good clothes
& remembered him
as best as I could,
alarmed by how sober everyone was,
& by the unending white teeth
of the earth, breaking through
all around me.

After, in the car,
my mother told me
about the accident in 1958
that took 31 years to **** him.
He "lived a kind
of private hell," she said.
At nine, I barely understood,
was terribly shaken.
I thought about it
alone in my room
for decades.

After that funeral
it took years for a death
to move me more than
the cold day when I was driven
to my cousin's body
and his unmoving blood,
which was lowered to a place
where I could not see it.

You are somewhere between
my coffee eye and
the toffee thighs of
the earth, bunching
into mountains,
scaffold to rivers.

You are something between
the wide words of Andric and
the wide words of your own,
a caravel in
the high tide
of my chest.

I met you here,
in this nowhere.

Between us was
a world made
of a single
held breath
& we unfolded
it so carefully.

Then we
exported
hundreds of
pages, fragile
& subtle,
& my poems
released their
grip on sorrow.

Blue gardens
in your smile,

sun's epochs
in your laugh.

There are no
sane words to
describe you.

Ropes of
champagne,

thickets of joy,
moon-pure,

hazeled Pisces,
canyon of
ravishment.

Our cheeks
ached
with bliss.

The world only
makes sense
through you.

Your hand-cut
bangs and
slender neck...
Something knocks
over in the night -
it's my soul.

This is
a blank
diary
day, a
day to
refuse
history,
a day
to buy
the sun
on credit.

There is
a vagrant
flower
in the
fragrant
bower
below
a dappled
maple
that
reminds
me of
you -
a traveler,
beautiful
wherever
it posts
its blossom.

A day
where
Lorca's spell
unfurls:
"Green, I want you green,
green wind, green branch”

The sky is
casually
tossed
into a
patch
of wild
spearmint -
this is
a day
where
we join
the high
things.

This is
a day
for a
child's
lace
dress,
a day
when
the bricks
sigh with
their
architecture.

This,
this is
a day
for coins
of clouds
to pay our
admission
fee to
heaven.

New Year's Eve dark at 4:30,
a dilation like a pleasured eye:
stray clouds pull themselves
across the clarity

& stars smudge unreasonably
across taffy-thin years of light,
long inviting blears.
I am peeling away from myself,

half-drunk on the absence of grief,
half-drunk on my lovely neighbor's wine:
it's funny how little moments
can pull together the murmuration

into a pattern you can hold:
I feel possibilities, sour morsels
of old dreams going loose
into the frozen nacre of street,

into the cubic alleyways,
rain smiles light as *****.
But moments don't hold,
something turns off -

the clouds are burning alive
in a songbird's oubliette.
The bastille falls
all the prisoners escape.

little birds swerve
into green chandeliers
in the park hexagram
with a seethe and a sigh -

hungry angels fill the air,
the sun gripes with marthambles,
melancholy fills a larynx
& light-shells spree across the walk.

I spent six hours at the bar,
wet talk and high song,
but the bier-bed at night's end
beckoned with red vacancy.

The aloe flowers are dying, drying
to flat little coral-colored bell-shapes;
hungry angels and little birds
peck at the windows just before noon.

Two marriages
lay like stones
in the desert
behind me

& yet

I'll be sizing
rings with her
this weekend,
this new bond.

The heart
is so irrepressible,
so unregenerate,
so sincere,

even as it risks
everything.
I hold my breath
for years.

Drunk in the Hirschhorn garden,
it seems  the sculptures rise
and take to air, bronze on bronze.
Swear as sweat drops in the corner
of the eye, squint against mounting glint
of the polished windows that gaze
so blankly over the glossy green estate.
Drunk again at noon, and hardened
by hurt against the friend who surprises
with criticism: she must realize it spawns
first inside the soul? First mourner
at my living funeral. O Jennie, swimming
through the garden with your cotton grace,
tolerate my dazed smile, amid the statuary.

The olive dusk tents overheard,
pleated, wavering, starless,

ghostly, embossed with moon,
scratched with street light.

Cars hunt across a new ice blanket,
casting tambourine shakes

onto the pavement as they brake
in cherry arrays. Tonight I watch

my neighbors in their curious coves,
each jaundiced room a flat Argus eye,

as they bed down, break off
the lamp network, pull blinds down

over myriad invisible couplings.
I have hesitations in the dark.

I see the neon-breasted giants
towering towards midnight

in this aching pavilion.
Like prisoners we send messages

with our mirrors.
At the Christmas market,

an etched man sells fake Egyptian
canoptic jars. "Viscera," he says,

"it holds your heart after you die."
The jar looks like it was carved

last week by a bored child.
Even if our hearts shrunk

to apricot pits, abandoned,
betrayed, disappointed, this jar

couldn't hold even one.
Still, I consider it for a moment.

But the olive tent is waving to me:
no sale, no sale, no sale.

My voice
enters
the air
as I speak
to her,
delves
there
in purrs
of wind.

If I am
silent,
and she
is sleeping,
the air
stutters
a little
as it speaks
its own name.

In the
language
that sails
the lung,
it whispers
about her.

In the
night,
the air
grasps
at cigarette
smoke
with
fingers
small
as a
hush.

It lurches
toward
the branch
of moon.
My father's
grave
is hidden
in the air.

The air,
the air
hangs
between us,
lithe and
endless,
almost
invisible.

When she
pauses for
breath,
the air
offers itself
in sweet
bursts.

In mist
and fog,
it learns
to kiss.

When she
speaks,
the air
is filigree,
like the
small laces
of a tree
in bloom.

Oksana said
"Love is not linear,"
and she was right.
It rises and it dips,
O how it dips...

Ebb and recede,
the quiet moments
vanish between
stars, doubt settles
in the ribs, thoughts
drift and drift away.

But trust in me:
anxiety and sorrow
cannot shake me
from your side;
just as I lean
to you in my own
times of worry.

Exit Tchaikovsky into the smoking mirror,
humid masks of the night servants
stalking down the water-walk.

Ash falls from a high tongue
all across the face of the moon embassy
like a bony comb through snow's hair.

Fade to brass: the cars sneer across the street,
interrupting blonde melodies held rapt
in plastic by cigarette Rapunzels.

I sit by the flower dress.
Bare legs slip across the old eye trellis
that masses by the death-green park,

muffling the memories that break free
from the black seance. I'm a braid of regret.
A bird is dead on the cement.

I'll translate
for you:

"Spring drifts
into me again
tonight, the lush
blossoms skate
up my spine by
the dance hall,
I'm on my
second beer
& I'm all nerves."

means

I am a wreck,
again. Half of me
stumbled
& fell for her
weeks ago,
& half of me
is a ticker tape
repeating
what she told me:
This is right now
This is only now
This is nothing else
This can never be
anything else.

Out at the bar
I meet Sarah
the bartender -
born the day
before me,
small tattoos
across her arms
& going
to Paris soon -
when those
two halves
collide,
thoughts get
messy,
& I am
churning
to pieces
here in the
warm air.

I am available
to anyone
who claims me.
Until then,
I am something else -
something less
than enough
& this eats at me
like an acid.

and

"Even the air
is asleep.
It's one a.m.,
I threaten
the quiet walls
with little music
that I send
towards Ireland.
My heart
is too shy
for night
games."

means

I get home late.
My thoughts
divide
immediately -
between
the faraway girl
across the sea
who speaks
like a shy dream -
and something
else, something
desperate.
I am too
sensitive
for the rough
*******
madness
of love,
but I can't
stand
solitude,
either.
The faraway girl
is right
about me.

Now,
maybe you
understand.

You
try on
the white
dress
with the
blossoms
across
your
*******,
the pink
dress
with the
cherries
stamped
on your
body,
purple
stockings
peeking
from
the hem
held
bashfully
in hand.

When
I saw
you
my
multiple
heart
could
crush
angels.

This
cloth,
cut close
with
the lust
of spring,
given
to your
dizzy
shape,
carries
me.

My
heart, a
palanquin
for yours.

I dive into your
burnt sugar eye
and bathe there
while the moon
stumbles to
fullness. Riots
of peaches joust
in the sunset
while sways of
black walnut
throw shadows
to the street.
Radio towers
blink away
in long ovals
of distance.
Lonely cars
drift as if on
the sea floor.
I share this
with you
while waxy
breezes trawl
across the face
of the new night.

In the legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, there is a small, magical, immortal dog named Petitcrieu who "ate half the sadness of everyone he met." He didn't gift any type of forgetfulness, but instead bestowed the ability to bear the sorrow easily.


Bells are ringing wet and pink
on a muscled shoreline of skin,

lining me with their tolling.
Their knell is so heavy in the ear,

it sinks into the sand chokes
trapped on my frozen tongue.

Someone great has vanished again.
The clang and clatter escapes

out of this red chest oven,
bangs around the wild world.

Grief is announced, by way
of cacophony. Where are the dogs?

The ones who eat our sadness
with their bellish barking?

Who look into our brief eyes
& remove the worst of the sting?

Who serve the moon, defy the sun?
They have gone missing.

Sorrow rushes through the waters
a blued frigate with a headwind,

overtaking the heart, the head,
the curried spine...

In this age, sadness is the magazine
that all of us are reading.

The truculent sun
escapes cloud guard
& serves us day

over green bonnet trees
that birth false fruit
where wasps crawl.

Now the roads fill
with rioting flax,
rose rays, rude rain -

there's too much life -
the world's heart is burst,
blonde-broken sobs.

The mulberry tree is night-ripe,
its fruit fermenting almost before dripping
down the branch to the gray-saddled sidewalk,
where birds refuse it; the sharpened tang
slips and spreads into the green closeness.
Char-wings spread out above me,
interrupted by static bursts of cloud
that stream from a southern vagueness;
the waxed crescent moon-blossom
spits a little of its milkish shine
towards me in the black heat.
The lance-lights of the streetlamps
snap on, lidless and yellowed,
venting that yellow down
into the wet cut yards.
Everything is quiet, empty;
in a cardboard box by my side
is her sketchbook, our locket,
her old phone. I look through the glass
at the blue cape that drapes
the sandy castle across the street,
watching as sleep comes for me,
mincing through hillside pines.

There is a moon on my back
down the rising line of street.
A cold night-throb echoes.

I can't get a job to stick
and the web of days
is more gap than thread.

The gaps are quiet, though.
Fourth story wind carves through
the screen like an axe.

The Monday girl is gliding
under the brown ice clouds.
Things aren't very real anymore.

I walk in rooms of winter,
looking for a handhold.
I blame myself for this

depression, whose greasy claws
fill my mouth. Whole childhoods
of rain are slanting to snow.

Your echoes
swim inside
me for hours.
Every shallow
shadow is forced
to eat your light.

Still, these cruel
miles stretch
like tendons.

For you,
I will fill the
catacombs of
night with
peaches
& music,
I will recklessly
drink a kick
of sun as it pours.

But to touch you...
It hurts to see
a sunset dying,
last gasps
of little coral,
and feel air
in the palm
of my hand.

Still: April denies
what May will grant.

The earth moves
according to its natural principles -
I love you according to mine.

Youth has left us so quickly -
the sun was once
a sweet saffron bolus
we swallowed so eagerly
fat day after day.

Now it's a quiet yellow *****,
that chokes on its own easting and
goes down like a horse pill in the west.

Instead, we are with moon -
I pull you close sometimes in tide,
then you're away waning, waning -
doldrums, tantrums.

If only I could swing low over you,
in your green rain town,
& not be pushed away.

It's no longer easy
to share the days with you.
I fill with ulcers
that bleed all into me,
the body the echo of the mind.

But I love you on natural principles -
you have touched my life all over.
Where I go, I bring you;
you are still the voyage home,
even when your replies come
so terse and lacking invitation.

This path
from Petworth
to the drowsy metro
is a bite of sun
across cherry branch
into the water head.

Greenleaf ways
& the grass throw
of the hum rails
cross the lefting
memory of a ride
in a salt shadow.

Saturday's breath
is sold to the hill
& in return
I get to keep
the sweet javelin
of her thought.

Salt pulpit,
streeted sand,
brass and tar,
bell broken
by the new wave.
Evening splinter
stuck in riprap,
memory hurled
into sharp relief.
Pilings grow,
dead teeth
from rushing
gum of surf.
Night's tide
parks on
blue sand,
dies as foam.
Boardwalk
lights never
seem to waver.

Night-hinted marriage
& old story ******* -
then another mono morning,
my mind a mountainside.
When I almost make you late,
your face so serious,
my polished misericorde
slips between the shining
plates, it knows with such
precision where to cut.
It's a proving hour,
long ices of thought,
before I pull it out. You
rest your head against me
& I imagine dropping
the blade into a scabbard
of blue hydrangeas.
I ask of you, if I lay down
beneath your troubles,
empty my unhappy hand.

The drunk came down the marble stair -
"You're talking out of your hat, Ned."
Ned says dying is OK, other things are worse.
The drunk came down the marble stair.

The humid plate mail clasps the skin.
Boys eat fireworks on the hill.
A burning windlass in paper-pale sky.  
The humid plate mail clasps the skin.

Live an authentic life, if you dare.
Don't let them take it with expectations.
Don't let them take it with advice.
Live an authentic life, if you dare.

I see what I am
& what I was
in the surging hazel
mirror of your eye.

The dragon looks
into the froth
of the waterfall
& remembers
the carp that
spent a hundred
years leaping.

Soft cerise band
& slate speckled
with cream cloud -
light birthed on a hill.

Night unslips its hand,
ultramarine, star-freckled,
from mintish trees bowed
low over dew-dappled sill.

Dear H-----,

Everything then
is now, too,

memory
is plural.

In law school
I mentored you

& let you ******
me after I broke

up with the art
deco girl who

kept turning the
blade in my side as

if it were a key.  
It was a scandal -

I felt my name
crawling lip to lip,

caught library looks,
but didn't care.

Your sister taught me
the moon game

at your kitchen table
& then spread my blood

with her song.
Do you remember it?

When I drank
my acetylene pain,

you were so quick
to forgive. It left

an impression.
We came home late,

laughing so hard
we were *******,  

with the moon
tangled in the ivy.

But I was still hanging
from the blade of

the art deco girl,
& it wasn't fair to you,

dying like that.
And then when

my grandmother
died, I needed you

but it was too much
& you fled. It was the end.

You moved, and married.
I let the art deco girl

saw me apart
a few more times.

But I never forgot
how alive we were,

or the strange sound
of the lullaby I wrote you.

Dear,
You're out late tonight -
in evening. I will open
at the moon. I might go away
to howl. Return soon,
Evan

"Sleep: those little slices of death, how I loathe them" -Poe


In my dreams I am always dying -
a Sicilian orange rolls down the walk,
the yellow branch-hand lets go,
& the starlings have all flown.

Why bother? My childhood sweethearts
are all miserable. Their children
have their own children,
terminal sin after terminal sin.

Ambulances go red as they float
slowly down the street. The dream ends
in a strange puff of vapor. Clouds die.
**** bodies move, then stop moving.

Let's face it: little slices of death
bring dark oils to the cheeks
of the depressed canvas. A skull in black
stares at the keys. It's over. Over.

The cloud sheet
threaded above
us is full of sea
clicks and little
blue turns of
shaved rain,
an alley of splitting
water that crashes
sleepily into gray.

This is where
words dissolve,
& wet night
intentions are
thrown away.
All that's left
in the dark
is your hair
drifting in
the pool of
my mouth.

"We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—"
-Shelley


Dad would have been eighty today;
instead, years have gone by since I ran
the two and a half miles to the hospital
under a burnt, charry October wing

to visit him in his mechanical bed.
He was caving into himself, the doctors
blamed the liver, everyone was scared.
The halls were stocked with floating eyes.

Today the heat gripped the chopped hems
of street and ate away at our feet.
The dish of sky grew gray as mold,
striped with varices of rain that did not break.

Everything waits: Wednesday waits
for Thursday's lip, the moon waits
for the thunderbolt tongue, I am waiting -
for almost anything, anything to happen to me.

Let intensities
drop away -

leave chains
behind you.

A forest's
bathing sway

enough
to bind you.

Release the
dying day,

so stillness yet
might find you -

quiet starts
to breathing's arts.

O moon, I will save you.
I watch you rise in the daytime,
stunned by the squat cancer blue,
overcome by snappings of cloud,
letting go the night-anchors,
looking lost up there.
I passed out, drunk
for the second time today
& when I woke up,
you were broadcasting
several degrees deeper
into a fool's gold evening,
a sickly sweet beacon, luminous
almost to the point of absurdity,
I saw all your seas and mounds
unskirted. You seem alarmed,
watching my wounds so closely,
yet absent of gesture,
an affixed milk-marrow.

I will save you, moon;
after all, I am your Sisyphus:
I push and push at you
with these soaking stanzas
& each night you tumble back.  
Do you remember rising over
the Hotel Tiquetonne in Paris,
when I tried to prize you
from your socket
above the church in Les Halles,
& give you to her?
But you resisted, so I exchanged you
like currency; the stars so fluent,
bands of bleach in your halo,
you grew hair that fell out
in screaming stripes,
& I ate tartare at midnight.

O moon, I know now
that I cannot save you -
if anything, you must come
& claim me away.
You seem happy in your tides,
so certain in your arc and arch,
the delight of little elevations
in the black valleys.
You are the knot in the bark,
celestial gland, eternal bone
that rules over all bones -
so come and get me.
O steady eye-knuckle,
someday you will rise
over a world that is unencumbered
by my step; by any step.
In its last days, the earth
will call you home,
long after my memories
of Tiquetonne seep into loam.

Cyclical cinder, little ash,
you will not weep -
you will not weep,
O salvage moon,
but will transmit the final stanzas
of a requiem to a world
that cannot speak your tongue,
but will understand the paleness
of a poem that is dying.