In the Paris giftshop
the one deep wing
of the vermilion angel
lanced the outer dark.

Outside,
draping olive lines
scattered and resolved
abstractly as trees.

The world was
filled with
incompleteness.

Back home,
with the second wife,
the night was fragrant
with barbeque,
nicotine,
& vetiver.

Having no direction,
I drifted into
the smoking rain.

Years later
there is an arrival
that thickens like glass,
a transparency,
a screen that flickers.

It's her, and
she's red-orange too.

An investment,
a face in gold leaf,
a pale labyrinth.

This time,
years later,
the deep wing
is a drifting veil,
and the olive line
connects us
like boardwalk string.

The glow of the glass
is a resolution.

The Winged Nike
of Samothrace
is installed inside me:
first the anxiety
of the reach,
straining for more.

Then the frozen music,
the perfect shape, even
with pieces missing.

Middle school, age thirteen:
that strange doubled feeling

when walking cinderblocked halls
painted calm institutional blue -

there I am, heart in hand,
clopping in too-big shoes

to the strobing gym to see the girls
in their new bright dresses,

our bodies and faces branching
into adulthood relentlessly;

to see friends wearing cheap new suits
& talking endlessly of Kelly and Molly,

of Sarah and cheerleader Brittany,
of the Other Kelly, Erica, and Erin

(some having thoughts of Bryan
& Kenny, Mike, and Other Mike)

Yet there is another of me
listening to checkered floor,

how the linoleum squares echo
as I stalk through emptied halls,

(how disturbing, when a known thing
is so reconfigured and unfamiliar...)

I reach the chaperone stand,
deliver my ticket from a hot palm,

step into the loud and wild parade
as the dimmed dance floor writhes

with pubescent shadows,
my shoes clacking and shining,

looking for Kelly and Other Kelly,
drifting to safer bleacher corners:

unaware that thirty years later
this night is still engraved

on the back of a breaking brain:
the year the harvest failed.

Every winter morning around ten
the shortbread sun tweeds its fingers

through this drowsy gauze, insistent
& curious, leaving slices of shade

like blades across the rug, arranging
itself like a mask across me -

today it squints over a killer's face,
for the cats rounded a mouse

beneath the liquor rack, broke its leg
at least, there was no saving it,

only hastening a sad end
& stopping its fear and pain.

Cats of course were furious,
their instinctual ritual interrupted

by unwanted mercy, by gentle hands
they now can't understand.

I drown the poor gray life,
& though I know we're both flecks

of nothingness in the absurd
entropic vacuum latte of universe

I feel a tremendous sympathy.
After all, what are our lives

except this same, but in slow motion?
We hunger - we risk and chance it -

sometimes we find the crumbs -
sometimes the swiping paw -

until one day the water rises over us
as the morning sun climbs in the window.

Coifs of lightning disentangle
under a black cloud lattice.

Thunder rustles to rude growl,
bracelets of leaf are trembling.

We're eastbound, hundreds of us
on this loosened buckle

of corrugated silver flash.
The rain attacks the window

in excoriating scrawls
slivering down into a sluice.

Red-shirted woman, run now,
over the yawning pool

that shivers with addition.
Blue-breasted runner, fly,

fly into clay-colored false dusk
that heaves with humid breath.

Escape from this wet hunger
that walks over us so indifferently.

We stumble nightward. Rain laces
our eyes shut. We're alone here.

Burnt sugar spangles
checker a green wall
the morning I'm on
an emergency call
with my former therapist,
who calls you my
major adult relationship,
& she is right.
Of course it hurts,
to lose that.
There's her, and then
there's everyone else,
& it doesn't feel close,
does it?
We're in a strange place.
I'd give anything I own
to board the next flight
from Dulles to Dublin
& nestle into the crook
of your arm over coffee
& almonds.
You put everything
you had into this one...
Instead I'm selling
this condo so full of you
that I can scarcely breathe,
moving back downtown
where the whitish blots
dip back and forth,
& waiting, waiting,
for something to change,
You just have to be patient
until she is ready
for one thing or the other.
& then it's noon,
& the call is over,
& the bobbin of sun
riffles back its little coins.
One thing, or the other.
Or the other.

The
night
is so
painfully
blue
that
my
chest
becomes
a cave
of melody.

Cars
exchange
blue
places
like chess
pieces
castling.

The moon
hears the
blue
dreams
of you
that
string
from my
fingers,
& bursts
with
desire.

I watch
planes
crisscross
the tube
of indigo,
but I
don't
care -

you aren't
on one
of them,
yet.

Andrei,

I was a child
when I read
a piece of paper
& you died.

You were a telegram
falling from the air,
a moth, a stray dog,
a liner note passing
through my hands.

I pressed play
& Chopin unwound
like a serpent,
the mood shifting
like the rainbow
that feeds on oil's skin.

I went out
& found more.
Rachmaninov attacked,
a chess game
where the pieces moved
ten at a time.

& the Prokofiev,
followed me
around the house.

I was a child
when I saved you
with my ears.
Let me save you again.

Come, revenge
yourself a little while
in my old records.

Intent is always blotted
by leaking speech:

words stray from their purpose
like star-bellied clouds

that stumble and fall
into a coffee cup,

burning with morning:
a wet mirror face.

The gutters murmur
with yellow leaf heads,

a branch escapes
from the wood (unwillingly?)

& the morning vaults
over the white creek.

I'm here, I'm here,
the rain is saying -

it stalks me home
after the concert.

I can feel the vacancy
you leave when you are far,
and a melancholy's taken me.

This autumn core has wakened me,
but the sun's removed from sky,
I feel the vacancy.

Other couples drift complacently,
in and out of bars,
and a melancholy's taken me.

The joy of the new art's forsaken me.
I hardly know what we are,
but I feel the vacancy.

I cross K street mistakenly,
distracted by a reminiscent car,
and a melancholy's taken me.

We flower in this latency,
this "attend et regarde."
I feel the vacancy,
and a melancholy's taken me.

Your
voice
combs
the
blue
of my
blood -

you're
so deep
I hear
you
even
above
the
knocking
gray
of work.

Your
voice
flares
in me,
a beacon
to
something
that
swallowed
400
blazing,
aching
pages,
& still
is
ravenous.

slurs the woman in her cups
when I tell her I write poems
late in the lonely evening.

She waves at the air conditioner
that mulches silence to hum lull,
"it's all just chemicals, physics,

actions and reactions, man."
Hard to argue with logic birthed
betwixt brain and frothing marrow

of glassy pint, so I tell her sure, ok,
& move the subject back to her son
who snaps time-lapse photos of ice

abandoning the toes of hills.
Still, her self-certainty rankles:
when I leave I pause and gaze up

at the sprinkled smears wetted
flat across the matte night melt,
any of which might be pouring

purring stanzas from radio teeth,
long-wave nigh-black rhymes
if we had ear enough to listen.

I heave homeward on clock feet,
blackbirds gashing the fog hedge,
as raw verse gnaws my thought.

There will be a totem -
maybe castles are green
in gavottes of sun,
or a sly, sleek-angled bus
by a sky-headed smoker
will make its play.

Yes, we're in a play
about these totems,
where exiled smokers
in a delirious green
catch the last bus
to the sun.

But that diva sun
refuses to play,
& eats the bus.
Ain't that a totem?
We'll always be green,
always casual smokers,

(or is it social smokers?)
flicking ash at that sun,
which is evening green.
In the museum we'll play
among the totems,
catch a line of buses,

& then another bus,
almond exhaust smoke,
until we view the totem -
a saddle on the sun,
a silence in our play,
a voluptuous green.

The same green's
splashed on the bus.
Maybe the best play
for a casual smoker
is to eat the sun,
eat the totem,

then eat the green.
Take the express bus
to another play.

My therapist is pregnant,
the same therapist I once appraised
while I sat clinically depressed
on her clean gray couch,
my burnt umber eyes scanning
inappropriately.

As I imagined her
with hand of wine
in a brick wall restaurant,
I justified myself saying
that everyone does this,
looked at their counselor
and imagined closing
that very fragile gap.

But my fantasy was brief,
broken horribly by the things
I had to say about myself.
And now her soft, wide belly
stings accusingly even
as I give my sincere
congratulations.

No wife, no family,
no children here,
just more lithium,
another year down,
another breakup,
and another "fresh start."
Another notch on the mind's cell wall.

I. You Will Make A Name For Yourself

She said my name - it stuck there -
a jot of air caught in space between us -
it hung there, it's still hanging there,
moss growing over the truth of it,
rain chipping away at the crags,
my name waiting to be claimed.

II. Success And Wealth Are In Your Fate

There is a hill where I go walking
that is covered in grave slants -
headstones effaced by scraping snows -
money and marble sliding green and down -
so many dead hands bidding to shape
their fate - they're shushed by vines.

III. You Will Receive A Surprising Prize

In an open window across the street -
creamy unlidded eye in beige brick face -
a woman has showered and is toweling off
slowly and deliberately - almost burlesque -
as the sun cuts morning's cusp
in bright-grown slices - coming for her.

Up on the deck
the pink cascade
of evening stumbled
against a blue stop.
Stars seemed fine
as powder.
The moon was golden,
a Brasher doubloon
nailed to the felted smear
of milky way.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
Fights on the street
scattered under the
water head. Brains
hissed with poetry
as rain dwindled.
We heaped stones
on the truth.
We knew it wouldn't
last like that.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
The world without you
keeps breaking down:
the morning motorcycle
won't stop idling, I can't
cut books from their shelf,
food is an accusation.
Stars abrade, the moon
is sold for scrap.
Where are you?

It's a fundamental law:
all matter emits radiation
(all of us even you right now)

& the energy level depends
on the temperature of the object
(inversely related to intensity).

This is black body radiation.
Here, in our meager summer rooms,
we have long infrared auras

(only lizards see them);
our atoms are gracefully aching away,
smeary leaking daubs in halo.

The hotter something is
(like that fling of sun up there)
the more energy it heaves away.

That molten starry tussle
is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit
(& so we see it yellow-white) -

"But," you say, "what if something
is hotter than a star, what then?"
Something, you mean,

like the strange chemistry that burns
burns burns burns burns burns
in my brain on a Tuesday night

when remembering an autumn day
in a cemetery in Paris so many years back
(Chopin Morrison Abelard Heloise Wilde Piaf &c)

it was such a perfect day with her
(the synapses and relays are all
clicking clicking clicking clicking

with wild remembrance)...
Well, then (in theory)
I should be giving off ultraviolet light

at an almost infinite rate (wouldn't I?).
I don't know what it means
that I am here in the plush dark

quiet and quelled by thought
(except perhaps the catastrophic energy
is scrawling and etching me into oblivion).

I.
Your words
are starry, lush,
crawling over quiet
amaranth pages in the air -
"don't go."

II.
Hundreds
of lights are smeared
like yolk by a long hem
of thunderheads that are hunting
eastward.

III.
I dream,
sometimes, about
the old lawns in Dublin:
the last time I felt clear and free.
What now?

A tide imperceptibly rises,
a sun dies just a little more.
New lamppost starlight
blooms but fails to hide
a carpaccio of night
pounded thin and fried;
autumn thoughts of all sizes
clot in the gut, a bezoar
that might be a bitter cure
for tomorrow's sweeter troubles
which double and then redouble.
Yet even a heart-worn raconteur
reveres leaf-fallen days;
wind rips a brittle baize.

What is this church
we've made for ourselves,
with elm-groved nave,
& grass-paved aisle?

What religion
did we raise here,
with insect hymns
of a spotted choir?

What gods did we move
under the maple,
tongues rolling,
chatting with lightning?

Rainwater buttress,
twilight altar, homily -
we built this green chapel
in the ribs of the vale

and practiced our love
in a pink-stained light,
where we were crying
out for one another.

They build their gods by hand
on Frenchman Street -

cup by cup inside baroque bars
bearded by brine-iron galleries,

fronting veils of mourning-lace
over ruddy O-mouthed faces,

dotted with glitter-fizzed phone forms,
glass skins decanted into alleys

shoving light down cobbled brows
and back up the laddered spine of palms.

They fill their gods with song,
the hairy-starred sky a smoking mirror

that pushes the music back onto us
as we scroll night markets in slashes

of color and money, strangers dreaming
on each other, discharged from the dives.

They don't build their gods to last
on Frenchman Street -

every night is only walked the once -
dissolve your empires, let the words

plunge under the strange black lash
that drowns the eyes to sleep.

We were just telephones
full of young ***,
sharp breath and sticky,
talking into sleep...

I'd dial into your machine,
it was your mom singing
"Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin,
you were so embarrassed

(with that button nose
you hated so much),
but it was always OK, Kelly.
We met just the once, at Alan's party,

for his basement Exorcist
& you clutched my hand in the dark.
When you're 15, that kind of thing
takes on certain meanings.

When you broke us up
I sobbed in my bedroom,
pleading to Richard Pryor
who I had pasted to the ceiling.

I lost track of you
until you married my blond
summer steakhouse boss:
everyone said you weren't happy.

Now you are a minus sign,
a gauze-ghost, an atom-gap,
a redheaded dull-bladed heartache
who I thought I loved, once

(in my teenage way, I did).
I buttoned my shirt wrong
while remembering you,
I tasted you in a glass of rye.

There is a freeze coming.
Wear a scarf, a good jacket:
the rain is coffin lacquer gloss
as it shines and skitters into ice.

Green-stroked leaf
over lapis door
with four panels -
black vinyl
perches shining,
a motorcycle,
a motorcycle.

It enters her eye,
the day's spillway
laid down
to beige page.
Color and form,
thrown from her hand,
thrown from her hand.

With irises black as limousines
you entered the grounds
without pronouncement.
You were like Baba Yaga,
cruel in your accidental truth.
Your achtung heart curled inward,
like a tar block, or amber.
With a pestle of love,
you ground me away.

Primo Sonno, the traditional First Sleep that was common before the Industrial Revolution, it occurred between nightfall and midnight after which the sleeper arose to interpret dreams, pray, write...

The cherry liquor puts me down
around the time the snowfall arrives,
when the blackish hem of night
is snugged over the last lacy orange light.

I have jamais vu - I see the familiar,
& feel nothing, an iron-browed stranger
gazing out at the dim flake-fall,
the urban hush that sweeps away the scrawl.

At midnight I wake to an insistent horn
deep in the street pockets. I dreamt
of people with guns following me,
gluey-eyed, marching quay to quay.

In the dark, I almost remember her.
In the dark, my stomach is filled with acid.
Shadows hiss in the bleary mirror,
a cold breeze scrapes a little nearer.

Back then, there
were no goodbyes,
and tomorrows
I swallowed like
chartreuse. Evening
buttons undone.
Bones whistled night.
Birds slipped as fire
rifled the yard.
I wanted to cry,
sweet-haired, low
with breath, as
someone built a myth
and then broke it.
The years deviled,
pears wasted away.
There were no goodbyes,
and tomorrows were
lost in the eye.

"All fleshe is grasse" -
In danger of the mow,
we go to bed,
fight with touch
the shortness of life.
Death’s repeal is ***.

Your words
open
in the quick
hours,

& the long
distance
feels like
a sway.

Here, evening
is installed
with blue
pieces:

blue tree,
blue cloud,
blue angle
of sky,

flat as a card.
The moon
is just some
flour,

flicked
into place.
The miles
step away

& I taste
your sweet
honesty
& want more.

Come, see the men
waiting for the silver
metro side with
pound-penny eyes.

Their little pistols
of breath break
the morning into
loaves of ash.

Look - the train
is a giant's rattle,
churning us all,
tattooing the path.

The cleaning woman
escapes the door into
a cleated brightness
full of hexagons.

The man in the suit
with the sad wrist
avoids my gaze
with leathery intent.

Look - children
chase a lost sparrow
that flew into
the station vault.

I exit the orange gates
out into the empire
of the sitting sun.
The sounds of the metro

decline into the earth.
Deduct the moment
from your day,
be glad of who you are.

Love's lost today
in teeth's glaciers;
& pallbearer feet,
tho pigeon-toed,
march me away
from erasure.
A heart escheats
to whom it's owed,
one must repay;
for love's nature
is grieving fleet,
& must erode -
an ache to rehearse,
repeated in verse.

Call me yours
in this country
of dusk.

Call me yours
in the blotted lilac,
in the acrylic
evening, in the
time-plagued
water mirror.

You know that
I will kiss you
& break the
honeycombs,
raise the sheets
as midnight sails
while rectangles
dismount in the
orange and
a gibbous moon
dwells in the
nettles of new
constellations.

Call me yours
in the earliest
hours when
the forgotten
fireworks drip ash
like broken snow.

Call me yours
when the whales
of morning begin
to stitch their
broadside song,
each to each,
& you raise a
tent of light
with your smile.

You know that
I will kiss you
among the
almonds of smoke,
the yellowed books,
the soft repairs of
yesterday.

Call me yours:
I know it already
but the sound
is a high garden
ploughed with sugar.

You are somewhere between
the track of my gaze and
Dublin's last days,
long with summer
& brittle breeze,
& fickle cloud
that denies a sun.

You are something between
a Daydream Delusion
& the poems I write that
speak your name with
every vocabulary.
"Limousine eyelash."
You are still here, and
you always will be.

My mother's friend,
bleak-mouthed,
took me to St Matthews
in cinder glory
& kept her eye
on the thin gold leaf
spread across colonies
of saint's faces.

No, I'll never forget
sitting in the blue car
with my mother
when she told me
Eileen's brother
had killed their parents.

Eileen moved
to Bristol
& got married.
She made calls
that rattled my mother,
sent fruitcakes long
distance.

When my father died,
she couldn't stop herself
from insulting him;
my mother forgave.

A year later,
she died swimming -
my mother's mind
leaned back fifty years
& remembered someone.

I...
I remember only
St. Matthews,
the way the windows
below the azure dome
hissed with light,
& how Eileen -
indifferent to religion -
explained the rules
of the candles
for the dead.

I'm inclined
on green couch -
I work towards
my best face,
my wrist angle
marries the *****-light
to the pane-shadow.
You, so darkly pretty,
totally oblivious
to the agonies
of little cameras.
We talk too few minutes,
say goodbye too soon,
fumble with the chemistries
that still crackle between us,
despite your wall and wine.
Little cameras reveal me
the wrong way, but
they bring you to me
across the thousands.
I'm redeemed
when my heart
pushes for you,
sweet glass.

Dear A------,

I remember you at my sister's wedding,
you had hands of wild river,

& clouded beach was in your hair -
I was halfway through a sober year

sitting in a rattan bastille chair
watching the sea fashions,

my ear full of jailbreak children -
but I was thinking of night shapes,

things transformed by the dark -
I thought of your recipe: lost keys,

waning crescents, streetlamp breezes -
how strange and free I felt right then,

evening's cousin dressed to the nines
under trees bent to ferocious shade.

Then years passed: another marriage
disappeared into ribcage landslides

& mind riots, jobs were just smoke,
then it was Halloween and I was 44

& I was in New Orleans.
I wondered if you claimed it

the way I once claimed DC -
ambushed by a lost heart

that crept up into me in the suburbs
until only the city crux felt safe,

surrounded by new people
who might be doctors or hangmen.

I missed you that Halloween night,
though I ate in the corner

of your restaurant before I was blinded
by the rain bustle and whisked back

into a hotel window. I missed you also
the next night on Frenchman Street,

& in Storyville and Tremé where I wandered
throughout the runny yolk mornings -

who's to know if you'd even recognize me,
they've been hard years since Ocean City;

until I see you next I'll leave this letter
like a sip of liquor kept in promise

of stories shared in a plank-barred dive
on Toulouse or Tchoupitoulas Street.

Yours, Evan

Easing into leaf:
Chrysanthemums opening,
Each one just for you.

Drunk on Hirschorn lawn,
all the sculptures rise
& take to air, bronze over bronze.
She floats the cocked corner
of my eye, a wince under glint
of gangly windows glazed
blankly across glossy estate.
Drunk again at noon, drawn
in by hurt - she surprises
with reproval - though it spawns
first in the self-soul, first mourner
at the living funeral. O Jennie, minting
through this garden with cotton grace,
tolerate a dazed smile today, amid the statuary.

I am looking away
my head in glass

across bell wedding hill
where fireflies lace over

green ******* of evening
bounded by bay grace

when a restless thought
slips brain pocket

& hides in castled teeth
like a relic of sugar -

a friend I gripped too tightly
when grief rose above my head

she pulled away gently
leaving only her name behind.

Ah! Here is a line of groomsmen
humid row by the bower

the last is the man she loved
he's brought a wife, a child,

& he won't catch my eye
I know he's broken her heart.

The towers of love have fallen
quietly in our private groves

stones bearded over with cold moss
until indistinguishable from hills.

When the yellow/green face
of this furnace valley is smudged
with summer's first rain runs

I dream about dad again:
7 years since that hospital bed
in Georgetown where he turned

to wax and I turned to water.
In the dream I was so small,
he took me to his old '80s office,

the tan portable in the field where
everything was cheap wood panels,
thin mouse-brown temp carpet.

He sat me down by his blackboard,
jotted with number theory,
& left to retrieve a book he needed.

I sat among the dry sun and dust
until I realized I was an adult now.
Eventually a man came to the door,

& said "why are you still here?
Your dad died years ago,
& we need the room."

The neon vests are huddled
against the white sleek of the van,
crowing cigarette gossips
as they warm up the machine.

The asphalt is plowed away,
churned and melted, black butter
of the earth, pecked to hell
by rapid, merciless steel beaks.

The foreman's memento mori:
tobacco's body returns itself to ash,
a smoked soul rises toward my window,
gray crown cooling and fading.

They strip the street.
Denuded, a dirt stripe stretches
into a water cradle.
They pour tar into a slick shape,

it gleams thousandfold,
accusing insect oil eyes.
Paths can be taken away, remade:
crooked roads straightened.

Two years of grief distilled
in gulped gallons: undone,
undrunk, sweated out
on the cork yoga mat.

New things are placed
beneath the surface,
filling the cavities.
New skin is pressed.

The orange vests disperse
into the rings of evening.
I sit and wait in the new dark:
someone is coming for me, and soon.

I once knew a man in a chair
made of cracked maroon hide,

he was wreathed by reefs of smoke
rooted in pipe-glow, and he told me

how youth was all maybes: maybe
I'd pan for gold in a cold course,

maybe love would drape me flashing
in slices like Christmas tinsel, or

maybe I'd **** someone who stumbled
into the road under pitiless wheels.

It's all just a handful of maybes,
held loose, dealt at random

as our paths divide, divide again,
divide into myriad matrices

of still further divisions: because
we're plural, we're entire armies

of fortune, and we fill cemeteries
with our regrets. Strange-faced

angels are also our oldest devils,
& anything can happen to anyone.

Until, said my friend with the pipe,
you reach a certain point in life

when maybe thickens to never.
When sourdough hearts know

that division is over, and it's entropy
steering our dwindling gambles,

when the lacunae are closer, more real
than memories of any yesterday.

The purple folding face drips
into the cake-colored battlement:
night is here again.
The sun has kneeled into the treeline,
into the gauze-clouds
whose humid cobalt heads
hang, hang, just hang
all angled like hammers
in a carpenter's belt.  

Everything seems to be ending:
cicadas have erupted
in tens and sevens
with bright scarlet eyes
to die on the sidewalks
in little hums and hisses,
looking at me through
whetted blades of lawn.

I'm moving soon, to the point
of the old triangle
where we haunted
the coffee and ice cream store,
where she stole a little shining spoon
that we used to mix the luminous milk
into the coffee pool.

How will it feel, after dark,
under unfamiliar high-stippled ceilings?
So quiet - she's gone -
her vacant clothes
no longer flutter in the closet
when the breeze slips through.

Will some rain come,
blue-brushed brow,
& wash this feeling away?
I feel the night moving,
crawling on insect feet -
the air is full of absences,
great holes that go unfilled.

The wind is settled in the east,
and the clouds are gathering
heavy hems.
I find a single dark hair of hers
on the inside of the pillow case,
years later,
years later.

You love him,
but he doesn't know.
All the stars go dim,
you love him,
with every breath a hymn,
but it doesn't show -
you love him,
but he doesn't know.

I hear the
fan blades

churning the
darkness,

& the minutes
seep like cough

medicine into
the floorboards.

Sleep is so thin
tonight, wasp-

waisted and
easily broken,

rising just
above me in

the black dell
of the room.

Beside me is
the flatness

of the fabric
where she'll

soon be, to
model the

sweetness of
night's middle.

But until then
I drift in

& out of the
dream where

I'm losing teeth,
my slow heart

pushing words
around the room,

thinking about money,
weighing my soul

against a feather,
using her pillow,

rustling against
that flatness

& inhaling
the vacancy,

listening to the
fan blades

churning the
darkness.

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others
-W. H. Auden

At 6 am there was thunder
loud enough to wake me and the cats
rain toe-tapping on the pane
calling us to the theater:

"Come look at us, heavy clouds
of dark morning: spray-headed,
sunrises in our throat.
Enjoy our Sunday eyes"

I did. The paper people
at the bus stop huddled
& dissolved under wet slants.
The crust of horizon broke away

into thick puff-parcels, and
beneath it all the water flung
itself against the scory stone
before escaping down the drain cape.

"Come look at us, the wet-nurses:
our hands on the doll-face petals,
the walls of leaves. We evaporate
into the sea engine, purring with life."

This morning I watch
knitted clavicles of light
hurtle in and up the wall
in my half-packed
living room, while cubes
of fresh spring hew
strongholds in the
birded birch yard.
But I am ready to leave
all of it for the ruptured
gray weeks, the rain lash,
the fog bars, the burnt sea,
the little tilts of rainbow -
for her - would she have me?

Glass-faced men preen
in high-polished chestnut,

affixed to a serene Medusa
with green-sunned fingers

that erupt from hive-eye blonde,
biting hearts down to their pits.

Green shirts drift up and down
the steep stair as razors of beer

shave us one and all, lathered
in tight heads of Guinness.

"All men **** the thing they love,"
shouts Medusa, reading aloud

from the depths of her purse
to her ****** and adoring date,

"give me your kiss, your sword,"
her words like ivy on old bells.

Not to be outdone, Brian turns,
looking like he's been here since

last night at least, and cries
"A drunkard is a dead man!

& all dead men are drunk."
Medusa is too busy kissing,

but we raise our glass hands,
exiled from heaven and hell,

slouching toward Tuesday,
& toast him from our graves.

Glazy rain snakes, are you lost,
wending in tandem on the pane's cheek?

You avoid my finger as I trace
your lacing knits of past and future.

I'm newly home from the pine bar,
curdled litany of flirtations

shed like a salted witch's skin.
I don't know why I do it to myself,

but the curiosity rises in me every time.
O rain, breaking and beading

on the glass lip, on the night loop,
I'm holding out my empty hand

to you, a midnight plea in hush:
teach me your way of cutting cloud

& slipping to streak an autumn eve
until you find that smiling smear

who tastes you just for fun?
The moon is shapeless tonight,

& all their eyes are locked in wax;
I'm impatient to make coffee for two.

A bruisy trumpet of cloud spills
upward from tower-top neck,

faceless grey guyser
pluming from brick bottle.

No wishes are granted today:
instead, the sponge-honey skulls

of dithering sidewalk elms
dream their green dreams over us

as the sun falters for a moment,
scattered through the lawn.

Come slip like shade
into my outstretched hand,

walk with me in an afternoon
somewhere between rain and fever.

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.

I.
Optimal allocation for partially replicated database systems on tree-based networks (1992)

My father the mathematician
his carapace beard slow-stained

with moon brook as he worked
at his pine wing desk, an old door

perching on cheapo steel cabinets
with a squat beige computer

whose fan hummed hymns,
strumming the dark.

II.
A lower bound on the probability of conflict under nonuniform access in database systems (1995)

Long drive in smooth maroon
the university belted by fog

Mandelbrots of rain blotching
the windshield face.

Dad sat and glowed with glass
commingled with chalk scent

I became part of Andre's posse
in an atrium bleached with cold air.

III.
Minimizing message complexity of partially replicated data on hypercubes (1996)

When Dad moved out of the farmhouse
we realized he couldn't see well anymore

a thick glaze of dust sticking to everything
coffee mugs of bourbon seeding every room,

******* glaucoma; pride and denial
kept him thorny, but my sister got it done.

When the ***** finally claimed him,
he vanished into the air like pipe smoke.