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?

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.

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.

Angry-headed poppy,
come deliver your sleep.
I want the black dream
that comes at 3 am,
& leaves only when
the numbers rake across
the face of glass.
O ****** poppy,
bring me the blankness
of your dry child -
my beloved slips
into scarlet wine,
she opens to wavering night,
without even my hand.
I down myself with coffee,
then wake with poems
erupting like lilacs
over a new grave.
Sweet-headed poppy,
come distribute your sleep.
I need the black dream
that comes so late
that it blinds me
to the ways I love her.

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.

For Eddy Walker

I lost my mind today
for a couple hours

I laid there but not-there,
disconnected, wires downed,

half-thoughts slipping through teeth
the other half dying between my face

& the puckered ceiling's death kiss.
Uncle Eddy is parted from us,

this goodless, badless ball
hanging blue in black nothing:

sea-stained vacuum, clouded, waxy,
moon flicking round it like a moth,

even as we scream toward the great lamp -
No: pull back camera, rack focus:

this hush-centered city
dreams itself away at 2 am,

grease-legged streets, rivets of dust,
as we all sail on. I'm alone on M street,

on a mercy mission. I think of Eddy
in all of the basements he saved with story,

of his chuckled smile
& endless cigarette puppies.

Now the lung is empty:
song lyrics from another room,

can't make them out as Eddy handed me
a guitar with the hand not holding a beer.

I played into the crowd wall,
Eddy laughed, laughed in the corner.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I'm pulled down the boulevard,
the shining hide of the hired car
reflecting all the salted yellow blots
that fringe the crashing air.
Speckled city, I climbed her stair
when the night grew late and taut:
I embraced all the darkest angles
of her room, the candied tangles,
the breasted murmurs, the knot
made of half-started words,
until the mind got waxy, slurred
by louche, unchaperoned thoughts...
O car, this hour with desire's bruised -
if you take me back, I won't refuse.

Dear E----,

The bus crawls eastward like an insect:
silvery carapace and compound eyes,

broad-spotted blue-red with ads
as we scuttle along the curb-crumbs,

outpacing a decaying Tuesday sun.
In my thoracic seat I think of love,

its strangest colors and contours,
gentle treacheries and bridges burnt,

a wavering lawn of doubled sleep.
Tonight we dine on margaritas

in our cheap pub on the hill,
hope the questions all get answered,

touch feet under the table in secret.
I'm sure I wear at your patience

with this haircut I slashed myself,
my many stumbles of attention,

all my errors of cipher and code,
& the old hot luggage of my battles...

but you persevere. Look up -
the stars are champagne perlage

in a dark coupe, and all around
the living are dying; the dying are living.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

“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.

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.

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?

Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.
-All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare

Another well-burnt dusk,
clouds clawing up and out,
denying the gray night-grave.

The evening is so fast:
raw-mooned, silvery-blooded;
our hearts are lesser-than.

Thoughts in a jar, prepared
for the thinnest journey:
O, the memory carousel...

No: Stop the grief, cork it up.
Throw the midnight away.
The gun is empty,

click click click.
The roulette wheel churns
towards the cold morning.

Careful, reader: look how
the black garden blooms -
shhhh - take a sip... forget them.

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.

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.

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.

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

You'll tell me that
you hate this
neighborhood,
& the midnight

adventures
I had years ago
down Dahlia St
& Georgia Ave

will strip away,
thin, ******.
I'll notice
the broken walk,

the dead grass,
the trash gathered
in the raw verge,
I'll be embarrassed.

You'll be unhappy
in the new place
you're in, and
I understand but

I won't be able
to reach you.
I'll have learned
by then to shut up,

grip the air on the
silent street, take
some steps back,
let you have

your thoughts.
I won't be able
to save this situation
with magic words

said perfectly
in a pentangle.
I won't be able to
rescue you from

this drift, I'll
only be a tether,
a hand across
the void.

It'll all be new
and foreign
and everywhere is
a walk in the sun.

Washington summer
will be a hanging heat.
Soon I'll chauffeur
you into the slots

of the city, but I'll know
that won't salve
your feelings.
I won't do anything

but walk by your side
until it all ebbs.
Under the radio
tower in this poor

neighborhood
I knew so well,
I'll still my tongue.
I'll step through

the weeds to the home
where I'll hope
you will maybe find
something yours.

A gaunt green so full of song:
a lark bunting nests in the holly,

under a marmalade chariot
with Catherine-wheels:

I mean both senses of the word.
Self-lashes leave stripes thin as days.

O, how I move my hands for you,
from pen to wrack, choking away

the sobs, sometimes, because
your city is far from this city;

but other times I run my thumb
across your kitchen scrawl,

across your glassed-in face,
across the things you touched

when the dream was living.
The gaunt blue princess

holly quavers beyond
the trellised net, thronged

with twig now: a little bird
caches its frail life away

from a cat o' nine tails sun
that is whipping & whipping.

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.

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.

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

Bittersweet,
this leaving.
It may have
turned a little,
but it was always
underneath you,
a comfort.

Still, your
blissed heart
is filled with
butterfly wings,
& the book-edge
horizon beckons
with sunrises:

You'll go east,
to friends who
can intuit the
new green spaces
growing inside you.
Tell them
       everything.


I will be waiting,
the face that
adores you,
like a prince
trapped in
a mirror,
restless to come
& enter the
world of hands
and lips -
& whispers that
ignore the ear
& dive straight
to the castle
of the soul.

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.

You are the passing shadow in the lavender,
the new wet leaf on the budded branch.

You sweep the year away again,
the morning ploughed blue to yellow.

Low tide grips and goes,
a seethe of chilled salt and muddy mist.

What remains is a breeze:
your cotton sleeve sun-speckled.

I send you this verse
as a mourning dove lifts

its black penny eye
under strings of evening,

& sings a falling song
cheek to cheek with the glass.

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.

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.

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.

i.
Your names
are a sudden
throb on
the tongue.

ii.
Your names
are a beachhead,
and the splitting
tide across it.

iii.
Your names
are diaries,
secret days
of ash and ink.

iv.
Your names
are the green
vocabularies
of the branches.

v.
Your names
are a shock
of gin in the
back of the throat.

vi.
Your names
are vespertine,
a soft song
in the evening.

vii.
Your names
are a corsage
of ether around
the wrist.

viii.
Your names
are an antidote
to the long,
long day.

ix.
Your names
are dreams,
mirages that
divide and rise.

x.
Your names
are the dark
brick fork
in my lane.

In the emptiness of my
father's birthday the
year after he died

I'm picking up my girlfriend
at the airport, and July
is a singing bed of trees.

A giant shadow roams
through my mind. Birds
slash in a surging field.

How is he gone?
I feel things slide
away from me,

memorials in the air,
when I confront
the gear of absence.

I drink from his favorite
coffee cup - "Key West,
A New Slant on Life."

I invoke him in so
many ways but the
shadow still moves.

The sixth of July
arrives and departs
in nails of heat,

& new faces draw
the sting away
from missing ones.

Myrtle grows wild,
white moon bells,
blood blossoms -

I trap these things
inside his old
Nikomat camera

as the day arches
its back to let
the shadow by.

Umber hillsides tumble
steeply into leaf, pine steeple
vault and nave, brook vale
dim to hush, branch dam
licks dusk, red lake
drains to night, tight-drawn.