"Then I realized I had been murdered. / They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries, and churches / …. but they did not find me. / They never found me? / No. They never found me."
-Lorca, "The Fable and Round of the Three Friends"

I dreamt that I died in green,
on a midnight hill slab
where the grass was speaking

in the hungry language
of new summer:
"Your headstone is but a tooth

gritted in my lawn jaw
gnashing the June fog
while wind slouches

into the crutched arms
of the evening maple wash.
Who will find you here,

your tongue throwing poems
clotted with moss and mood?"
I woke to a jousting shadow

charging up the wall
& the toddling pink sun
lathe spun to brighter pool.

The dream of death
hung from my ear,
whispering of green.

This is for Liz, who once sat down with me
& spoke of terrible but necessary things.
Her eyes browsed me and I paled:
she locked our minds together
to make sure I understood
exactly what she meant.
Liz died last Saturday.
In our joint years of poetry
(filled with unexpected stings
that left our arms in gooseflesh braille
'til she digressed to dogs and leather)
she taught me this: that sorrows should
be shared - cultivate them, let them ferment -
so we could drink them down like Cabernet.

In for a penny, in for a pound,
just throw the cork away:

the glass is filled until we're drowned.
With murmur and rumor we pray,

dreams mantling like thorn-crowns.
How much could two souls weigh...?

More than a feather. Well, together we're bound,
& together we'll stay.

Who'll buy the next round?
Pint-hands are cold and mottled as clay,

their faces spinning lost and found:
can't win if we don't play.

When the hour comes round,
there's a bill to be paid

before sleep seeps from the ground
like steam... No, lover, this way -

come sever the spine of the town
with me, two fraying strays

riding each other all the way down,
eyes flat and cold as old ashtrays.

I walked out last night,
barley-headed,
soul burnt down to a stub,
into a black chassis
fenced with star -
my hairy-eyed heart
carried on so.
But I am thankful for you,
my friend,
who so easily righted my keel
back into the tide
with a graceful turn.

Your words sift the holly,
brace the moon,
they are petrichor
in the lavender fields.
They come across the sea,
I eat them like pastilles.
I refresh the screen in hopes
that they have spiced the page.

The way I imagine you now,
in this moment,
you are running,
lifting the beach fleetly,
trailing a supping sun -
go, then, and know that the world
is so much better for you.

Machine riot pink
stone light sails
velvet bay blink.

Ice lynx ink
black trunk rails
machine riot pink.

Jade earl sink
shyly arc pails
velvet bay blink.

Chair hollow think
hint blinded gales
machine riot pink.

Reverse zip drink
plum brass wails
velvet bay blink.

White mint sync
bright pint hails
machine riot pink
velvet bay blink.

O Irish
girl, here
is a dream
of old
Furies
adrift in
the young
night,

arrogant
and
swift
as the
swans
that swim
the canal
out your
window.

There is a mourning dove
cocked and tense on the olive sill
in dense rain, watching me.
I could fly to you,
if I were built like that -
hollow-*****, flashing past
these green and pink limits.
My arc would be unique,
no little starling chop,
no house finch bolt,
or fish crow sine,
past seeded wood to the sea,
I'd manage the upper air,
the transparent sinew,
landing in that little fork
by your slid window;
the song I'd sing
would fill your heart
with new choices.

We lunch on dust.
We wake, wage our campaigns

of mistakes across a quiet,
wary, unwaving old world.

No greeting, no parting,
no arriving, no leaving -

we are jabs in the air,
crudely curbed animal feints,

& then our names are packed away
& left forgotten in a taxi,

or in a train station bathroom,
or in a fray of rain.

Don't think too hard about it;
that, too, is a mistake.

In a photo
a man is
lighting
his
cigarette
in a
grain of
shadow,
his face
just for
a moment
caught
on a
hook of
light.

It could
be anywhere.
Maybe
even
this city,
clad in
green
squares
& stone
circles,
whose
soft
evening
runs
like yolk
into night.

Then
in another
photograph
I saw
the
hallelujah
of your
face.

I forgot
the
speckled
city,
I forgot
the man
& his
vine
of light.
My own
name
seemed
drunk
with you,
lost in
the wine
of your
talent.

Some
things
are
branded
on the
inside
of your
skin
forever:
the taste
of milk
or mint,
the raw
flower
of ***,
the slow
sacrifice
of the
candle,
a first
love,
& a last
love.

Darling,
turn me
inside out
& sign
your name
with fire.

My cubist
face looks out
the window at a
moon wrestling
sinuous blackish
clouds that fling
welting scales of
rain in little belts.

My face enjambs
like these lines,
& I catch sight of
the cloud basin
climbing higher
& higher into
the upper champagne
of the atmosphere,
clouds the same
shade as dull teeth
in a wet mouth.

The angles of
my jaw -
cameras fail
to distill it.
Or I am so full
of wild will
that no one
notices my face
is a trompe l'oeil.
In this pale light
I'm all cheek
and brow-
another bottle
of wine and I
can smear my
own memory of it.  

The clouds
I mentioned, they
fell one by one
into the Anacostia
river, never to be
seen again.

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.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day
-Lord Byron, "Darkness"


Eater of broken meats
touching the night skin:
an ebb and flow of rain
scolds the window.

My skin bursts with olive slivers
with no hand to calm it in the morning.
Scalpel water from the white basin
glistens on a lip tatter.

The moon is failing.
Crude isolate breath
hums above the bud-elm.
Young drunks are wailing

as they hug one another,
twinned by the street flicker.
I succumb to sleep's disease
with your book still in my hand.

We were the shining ones.
Our bottles never broke,
coffee was always at
full steam. My perfect
memory pulled at the
hair of time. Your wrist
tattoo sighed in the sheets.
The bed ached. The sun
was a press. We were the
shining ones, to be sure.

But then you were called
back to the green. I watched
your plane. I dropped throbs.
My heart was broken harp
strings. There was fever
crying in my hands.

But you will be back.
You'll cross the hems of
the world. I'll hold you
again in the sweet of
the night. You'll draw me.
Your paintings will sing
Hallelujahs from the walls.
The moon will moan glory
from its lonely sconce.
We'll be flooded
with reunion.

The sun
pulled your
plane across
the petals
of sea.
On afternoon's
blossom
you're here,
two months
of waiting
fulfilled
by two silver
lines.

Come,
and be my
Renaissance -
share the gift
of your mind
over a cup
of strong coffee,
and talk,
just talk.

I have stopped leaving this room
except for exigencies. Why bother?

Deadened clouds skate on the face
of the black rectangle every night

no matter what moves I make,
& somewhere up and out there

is a numb and strangely ovular moon.
It's all very far from me;

I wash my hands of all of it.
I watch the strange geometries

of strangers sitting tipsily
along the hypotenuse of Columbia Street,

laughing and singing happy birthday to Joan.
Joan is wearing yellow. While they all sing,

she gazes into the lush sinew of the trees.
A thousand years ago...

this street was just a brackish pool.
A thousand years from now,

serpents will bathe on the brick wreck.
But tonight... Joan and her circle

sag and slink into lavender flatness.
Soon they are specks, and then nothing at all.

Eight years
is long enough
to let yourself have fears.
Eight years
is long enough for tears,
too. It's tough.
Eight years
is long enough.

She said she got out of bed with me
feeling halved, as if something was removed

during the night. She called us the zeroes
in the hundred, with the world our one:

we got kicked from bar after bar
when she blew up at me, threw pints

& chairs, and then later we'd make up in bed
until we were both crying from the toll.

Friends would pull us each aside
& whisper warnings, ask if we were sure

this was what we wanted (of course not,
but in for a penny in for a pound).

In NYC at the old pine bar on my birthday
she got so drunk she fell from the bar stool

& sobbed on the floor that no one loved her:
"You should save her, even if you can't

save yourself," said the old devil
conjured when I was 4, still there at 29;

I listened as it made secret promises of love
in exchange for burnt offerings, broken meat.

I remember the slip of her hand in mine
while she stepped around a tarnished

subway grating for fear she'd fall through
& be lost to the stone: "That's it," she said,

"that's my worst nightmare down there -
to be all alone, hurt, crying out from a well,

crying from the dark, the wet dark,
to be in a place where no one gets rescued."

We'll be seven
hours apart
& heaven
for poor Evan

is across the chart.
I already feel
love's dart
transfix my heart.

But night's wheel
goes by,
& day's repeal
undoes the seal

& soon we will tie
our voices tight.
I send a lullaby,
carried with a sigh.

A quartet has lulled me
to sleep this week:
Ardbeg, Bowmore,
Talisker, Laphroaig.

I'm holding this in,
living coughing strings
of days oh so carefully.

Walking home
through the drowning
grove in the sunken park,
I vacillate like a nurse's hand
choosing veins. Either way,
blood is coming,
with a blooming bruise.

My particular curse,
falling into these affairs
that end up straitjacketing me,
choosing the wrong things.
I need someone who'll reach,
but narrowly, narrowly.

Bartender, bartender, tell me a tale
while you sell me a pint of whatever's on sale
-Traditional

Barflies stuck not in amber
but in soft varnish on pine,
steel pole legs scraping the planks:

men bluster in bleary candor
while women lay it on the line.
We at the bar give golden thanks

for this wet and flickering space,
tended by our good mistress
who heals most open wounds...

but not mine. With a tired grace
I slip outside, dissatisfied, listless
under the frozen starless dunes.

The early blurry dark tar drape,
the annihilating television sky -
under it, we're drifting floes

in a snow-veined river as winter
shadows slum through a beetle-browed
rowhouse valley, all the stars frozen

& ****** away by slow and humid glow.
Tomorrow's rain belongs to tomorrow -
tonight's pattern is hot and pink,

like something simmering just underneath
tautly-sheeted strokes of skin.
Must all our poisons be so sweet?

Those first Thursdays you were ringless -
we were cloud-shares with starry bearings,
lakes of mercury eeling under our skins,
small moon-screens in our palms.

And then, on that nervy warm nightwalk
when I was about to ask you to coffee,
you pricked the air and felt me leaning:
Ah... you're married, ten years now.

Flirtations wilt into aches.
Yet even now, as you wing away,
a streetlight's encore sprays pinked spangles,
& storybook trees are shushly budding.

The rain comes and goes.
Ribs and thews pull into a heart,
even as the evening pulls apart
with a bird's telephone step.

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"
-Shakespeare, As You Like It

Panic flocks to an actor's lip:
my perch and cackle cauldron eyes
grow to zeroes at the bed-end of this,
the only stage & staging of my play.

The plot unknotted shows that
money's short and friends are few,
the body betraying itself busily:
an absurd third act.

The audience talks over my lines,
ignoring the tree tops exploding,
the neighbors *******, the heavens
& the hells standing empty.

Yet they hush when the curtain rises
on mosquitos haunting a Brazilian cafe
dotted in cochineal - Aperol spritzes
scatter along a failing, darkling rail.

We can't pick our audience;
neither can we deny that they
can only do their best within their needs,
nothing else or more,

& midnight confessions, truest
& heart-rent soliloquies, are nothing now
but furtive scrawls across a torn ticket,
swept up when the house lights come on.

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.

You punctured my heart
   with your name -
      you had my full attention.

With irises black and sleek
   as limousines you passed
      my soul's guardhouse
         & entered the grounds
             unannounced.

But you were like Baba Yaga,
   cruel almost by accident,
      tongue of threat and spell,
          your achtung heart
              curling inward,
                 filled with teeth.

With a pestle of words
   you ground me away.

For years I swam
with pockets full
of stones. The cold
water rushed to
accept me. At
the bottom was
another night
& I lived there
for far too long,
pockets sewn shut,
& my lungs wings
of blackest mud.

I broke free, and
drifted up to
the veins of stars
wavering on
the water's skin.
I took the air
& ate it whole.
Poems dropped from
my brown eyes, I
found you, I was
ready. Dreams lay
below spruces,
with coins of sun
we bought tickets
to history.

But will I hear
those stones again?
Singing from the
false night of the
drowning floor? It
keeps me awake
in the lean hours.

This poem will say nothing.
"Clouds snowed in the yard,"
and I record it here,
for reasons unknown even to myself.
The clouds have wine-dark pelts,
but that’s nothing new: skies are hard
to find new lines about. Poets fear
the cliché, try to enjamb around it – won’t help.
What is the jaggy cumulus mouthing
in the upper distance? Coagulating lard,
the snow meets salt, goes gray. Look up, peer
into that distance: skullish hills melt,
discolor into the hue of bruise or welt,
as if even the earth self-flagellates, regards
this day with self-loathing. I’ll change gears:
turned skyward like a telescope,
this poem said nothing.

My mother and I are
knee-deep in my
late father's storage
unit, which is filled
to the joists with
old math textbooks.

I scrape away the dust,
strange names emerge:
   numerical analysis,
      combinatorics,
         steganography,
             astrophysics,
                 number theory.

We don't understand
even a single page,
we decide it feels
fine to donate them,
the entire collection -
how many years did
we watch these books
decay on his shelves?
If there was a favorite,
he never told us.

Yet what a surreal act,
to thread steps into
this aluminum room
filled with the very
last of his things,
& collect these
books that I often
thought were almost
holy, filled with the
sigmas and matrices
of his high religion,
& now they're just
dust and weight,
                             dust and weight.

To E--,

The orange sky
at 9 pm
is thrown over
the streetlamps,
bursting the
starry seams.

It's like you're
here, sometimes,
on this couch
the color of
burnt grass,
looking back
past the gauze
into the
hinging face
of night.

In truth,
you're sleeping
at the crux
of two
continents,
in an
eight-hour wash.

Every night
violent dreams
find me out
& unsew me
a little bit.

But soon
my wing of sleep
will be clean again,
because you will
be returned to me.
The orange sky
at 9 pm will
stop revolting,
and the night
will again be
the sweetest
of burdens.

Always Yours,
E---

Curious things emerge
from this last cup of gin.
Maybe I've been too alone
with the rain and with drink
because strangers converge
into thumb-smudged skins
washing over smoothed stone
into the storm's glottal rink...
I'll stop there and stem
these mannequin thoughts
seeded by a dollar's solitude,
watered by a fallen hem
of night. Thunder's brought
a brand new mood...

Dear H-----,

We were such a scandal -
in their schooling mouths

our names were broiled to ash
by raw rumor and we reveled in it.

We blitzed your blonde bedroom
naked and sugared with sweet steam

& reciprocal obsession.
Each night was a fresh first date,

we measured each other with miles,
with syrup sorceries, with dizzy eyes,

until we crashed under beetle-brow
linen piles, romance shooting inside us

as the rain pooled in drum slopes
on the clay court outside the window.  

But it couldn't last. You were sailing
into harbors of high privilege,

a world of guest rooms where
I had no station. When your sister

played the green glass game with me
in your mom's kitchen she hinted

at clouded designs of friction.
She was right - when Oma died

you retreated into verdigris,
atoms decayed into smaller atoms,

& we slowed and watched in wonder
at ghost-flurries of new spring between us.

It was done, but I miss you nonetheless,
& send my best; yours, Evan.

In the deeps
of my night,
your sun opens.
The sight
of your words
sugars me.

When my own sun
achieves the tartness
of noon, you are
opening a book
beneath a
bismuth moon.

For you I still
a heartbeat, send
it on its way.
It will reach you
by morning.

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

I will write about it,
someday. Today,
though, my life
huddles under
a blue raincoat.
Someday I will
tell it all, really.
See, the problem
is that I have
given away
all my secrets,
but not to you.

Tuesday night and
you've accepted
the proposal, yet
under the chandelier
of mistaken fireflies
you half-smile,

a drawn curtain
that I can read
enough to worry,
to feel
the body
move away.

The rest of the night
is a sharp nerve,
& gray fingers
of a fog slip
down the street,
thin and ashamed.

Battle day,
bottle night,

shrug the pills,
eat the light,

wrist of stars,
dripping yellow,

garbled sway,
muting fight,

madeira rill,
salt pier height,

wet ring bar,
moon's bellow.

Their names
in tatters,
old cardboard,
in the dim
school hall.

Is it a dream?
My old jacket
sleeping by green
cinder blocks,
posed by the
locked boiler
room door?

It is a dream.
The snow has voted
flake by flake
and I must leave,
sweeping my tracks
with an elm branch
as I go.

I do not belong there,
in the past, where the
apricots are always ripe,
where the hopscotch trees
frame the laughter of
their young faces
in amber.

I'll visit them
like a deep sea diver,
in the silence
of pure oxygen,
turning over the sea floor
to find their names
in tatters,
old cardboard.

Tree, tree,
dry and green.

The girl with the beautiful face
is picking olives.
The wind, rake of towers,
holds her by the waist.

Four riders passed
on Anadalusian ponies,
with blue and green suits,
and long dark coats.

"Come to Cordoba, girl."
The little girl doesn't listen.

Three bullfighters passed,
thin-waisted,
with orange suits
and swords of ancient silver.

"Come to Seville, girl."
The little girl doesn't listen.

When the afternoon wore
dark purple, and was fading,
a young man passed, who was wearing
roses and moonlight myrtles.

"Come to Grenada, girl."
And the little girl doesn't listen.

The girl with the beautiful face
keeps picking olives,
with the gray arm of the wind
tight around her waist.

Tree, tree,
dry and green.

**

Arbolé, arbolé,
seco y verdí.

La niña del bello rostro
está cogiendo aceituna.
El viento, galán de torres,
la prende por la cintura.
Pasaron cuatro jinetes
sobre jacas andaluzas,
con trajes de azul y verde,
con largas capas oscuras.
"Vente a Córdoba, muchacha."
La niña no los escucha.
Pasaron tres torerillos
delgaditos de cintura,
con trajes color naranja
y espadas de plata antigua.
"Vente a Sevilla, muchacha."
La niña no los escucha.
Cuando la tarde se puso
morada, con lux difusa,
pasó un joven que llevaba
rosas y mirtos de luna.
"Vente a Granada, muchacha."
Y la niña no lo escucha.
La niña del bello rostro
sigue cogiendo aceituna,
con el brazo gris del viento
ceñido por la cintura.
Arbolé, arbolé.
Seco y verdé.

-by Federico Garcia Lorca
translated by Evan Stephens

She wrote our love in water,
(the rain lived in her)

we drummed into each other
with blue Pontiac fumbles

breath skating our necks
& empty loops of denim left

in book-spilled footwells.
Our smiles cooked the dark

as we recalled the road
to Cincinnati, to see the college

on the hill, her mother
& her friend up front,

us in the back seat napping
(& then not napping whispering

with the wet of our eyes,
her fluent periwinkle

my coffee-steam pools),
hands so careful so careful.

She wrote our love in water
(the waves lived in her)

our names purling, creasing,
stirring, smoothing, gone.

She arrived
on a green wing.

She pressed the little curve
of her smile through a wide

wet heat that dropped
across the nestling city.

I squired her through shades,
worried about her sun-mood,

we drank coffee like mother's milk,
I worried about the green wing

that idled in the black field
of my mind, to carry her away.

It felt like a fairy tale.
Autumn arrived and wrestled

with the bright arm of summer.
The sun died in my pocket.

The moon cried behind gauze.
Corner stores kept selling

menthol one hundreds,
green wing echoes

that pressed on me.
We studied cakes and kings,

we looked at art the new way,
we traveled to the old cities

whose alleys twisted like veins,
branching with histories.

The customs man is obliging,
waives her future a few more weeks.

She has a firm date
with the rain city.

The green wing lolls in slow
circles through my thoughts.

When she takes those steps
toward the old castle,

toward the streets of beer
and whisky, toward friend

& half-friend, my heart
will turn to water in my chest

& the purple day's-end
will fade into a bruise-night

where I sit alone, choking on
possibilities, and wondering

why my hands now
feel so terribly heavy.

Aşkım
ben her zaman seninim.
Bu yarım şiir
sizin dilinizde
asla yeterli olamaz
duygularımı ifade etmek.
Çok bağlıyız,
Anladığını biliyorum.


"My love,
I'm always yours.
This half poem
in your language
could never be enough
to express my feelings.
We are so connected,
I know you understand."

Welcome home,
little darling,
to the starry comb.
Welcome home
to dine on tomes.
Hear the starlings?
Welcome home,
little darling.

On lover's lane
we cancel the rain
with champagne.
On lover's lane
kisses entertain
& endlessly sustain.
On lover's lane
we cancel the rain.

“Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea”
-Gregory Corso

A hundred thousand red laps
from one midnight to the next:

the valve clutches and clasps
at wet clapping truths

but they slip away like silk scraps
in the black gap breeze.

The heart is no throne, but wrapped
gnarl - the abandoned winter's nest,

denuded strakes of burlap strap
curved and curled into the branch fork,

disguising the lacuna and the lapse.
Does the river gladly pass into the sea?

Or does the sea sip it down, easy as a nightcap
with chill willow and spruce,

another blue vein-line snuffed on a map,
another salt stone silting an unseen reef?

I.

Tim collapsed in the bathroom
of the cheap-grease pizza place
where he slogged away idles,

hole in arm. When he came back
from the hospital, I asked why
& he had nothing. A few years

went by and I saw him at a bonfire
& he said, hey, do you remember
that old knife game, mumbletypeg?

Well, it's not the knife flying,
not the blade sinking and shaking,
not the thrill of almost-pain,

it's getting low to the ground
hearing the world get quiet
as you grab the sharpness,

visiting a hungry paradise,
tasting the watery loam in teeth.
"I want to feel the most."

II.

Tim got sober and died
to a wrong way drunk driver.
By then we all knew life

wasn't fair, but this was unnecessary
cruelty by the gods or not-gods
or whoever is cutting threads.

At the next bonfire after that
we remembered him in slices,
how he always wanted to feel

"the most" - how he'd sit
at glazed parties with guitar in lap,
toying with that Metallica solo

to One with his tarnished silver
spider's hands, his eyes covered
in shine as he played softly

an easy laugh readied,
mind full to bursting,
maybe with mumbletypeg.

The cherry tree pauses in
mid-pink detonation
as streetlights snap off,
a negative yellow sinus
in the soft-shelled skull
of dawn's first sagging.
My house is sold soon,
sterile without you
& your sun-stamp.
I will move closer
to the greenish loom
we both loved.
Here - a handful
of raw blossoms,
an invitation.

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.

Red lucent smears
of black bird night
on flat water shine,
everything doubled
by the canal.

Sleep in beer,
old gold light
played over pine
& I'm troubled
by old rationales.

An image appears:
the same sleight
of heart, same shrine
made of rubble,
same blinded chorale.

I am flying over Vietnam
watching night clouds slaughtered
by the sleek plane arm
with engine hands.

My book has become tedious,
my partner is sleeping,
so my thoughts spin awry,
a mad turnstile oiled with grief:

Where did my father go?
Where is his mind now?
& What about the curious pull
of the undertow in his soul?

These questions that have no answers
fall like rain into the night sea;
I, too, am part of the cloud division:
drifting along, severed into air.

The bartender says my moon's in Pisces,
Leo ascendent, sun in Aries.

The room loses its light, turns
the blued complexion of an oven

cooling off as the meat rests.
Elbows like tent poles

sunk into pocked bar top.
Thinking about all the Pisces

I have known, so many.
Maybe there's something in this?

Then I think about K----,
who went Chicago to Berlin.

When was her birthday again?
A dalliance in slips and slices,

two marriages on the skids,
hearts pushed through a sieve

across 700 miles. Was she a Pisces?
I remember she didn't want more kids,

& my world hardened.
I guess I'm to blame there.

When she evaporated, post-Berlin,
where did she end up?

Moon in Pisces, moon in Pisces...
lonely in my cylinders of beer,

the memory pares me down
until I'm just nerves fanning out

like the naked head of the tree
brushing up into brown eaves.