Salt crush,
brown rubble
of eye.

Honey low,
string sob
on cheek.

Send sweet,
spun tongue
in tow.

Left spent -
night stop,
black brake.

By dawn's five
I'm hers
all again.

The following is an account of
expenses in connection
with the Underwood investigation.

Expense account item #1:
$24, cab fare to your office.
Case of Jane Underwood,

Seattle, not seen
the last eight days.
Insurance policy on

her: $10 million.
I took the case.
I cocked my hat

low over my eyes,
cigarette behind the ear.
Expense account item #2:

$322.74, airfare to Seattle.
I interviewed the family,
the friends, the husband -

they all had alibis -
& also the man
she was seeing on the sly.

Expense account item #3:
$33.08, two packs of cigarettes,
a pack of gum, and a beer

at the neighborhood bar
where I watched Jake Wilson -
the Other Man in the picture.

Expense account item #4:
$29.90, cab fare from the hospital
where Wilson just gave it up.

I found him folded under
a neon sign by a cheap hotel.
I didn't see where the shots came from.

Someone wants Underwood
the stay missing, very missing.
Expense account item #5:

$120, a new coat, the old one
has bullet holes. More close calls.
Digging around, I learn

Wilson was knee deep
in counterfeiting Franklins.
Crowbar to the basement door

of the house he was renting
under a different name,
I found the missing woman,

cuffed to a radiator, mostly fine.
She found out about the funny money,
threatened to go to the cops

unless Wilson cut her in.
She was over her head.
But then - so was I -

who shot Wilson?
Expense account item #6:
$75, marriage license, King County.

Jane Underwood and I are
running away together
with the bad hundreds.

Time to end one of these
stories the easy way.
Tired of Hartford,

tired of heart's noir,
consider me retired.
But then, holding her hand

driving to Los Angeles,
her purse falls open
& the gun that killed Wilson

falls into the footwell.
It was all a setup. It always is.
Her hand gets cold, tight,

real tight. The ride
is about to get... difficult.
If only she knew, if only she knew

how many times I'd seen this
twist, how many women,
how many guns, how many

Wilsons had fallen to the ground
under how many cheap
blinking blue broken neon signs.

Where are you?
They buried you
in a sleep in the air
so I must mourn you
everywhere;
even with this poem,
this cenotaph,
this memorial
to the notches
you left inside
your son.

You're glassed into the closed door,
gloss across you like an aegis
against me. On your phone,
your eyes come up, see me,
send sorries, draw down.

In my first visit to the store,
I remember pamphlet pages
and seeking quinacridone.
It was the white wreath
of your soft look that I found.

"For where thou fliest I shall not follow,
Till life forget and death remember,
Till thou remember and I forget"
-Algernon Charles Swinburne.


The day is leaking out in the east,
from a spoiled, dripping lump of sun
that carves its way through calving cloud
en route to the pillow of your eye,

the eye that will never read this.
It's your birthday under cold green rain
in the almost-city, and my grief
stalks the quays, searching for a gift,

a gift that will never be given.
After all, "change is sovereign of the strand" -
the sea that burns blue and white,
inflicted with salt-ghosts that ring the sand,

the sand where I stood in a heart-sleep,
my name eroded by the spaces between stars,
with a cleaver stuck in my mind.
"Behold what quiet settles on the world" -

the world that has slipped away in the dark.
I send you a long sweetness, wrapped
in evening. I send you a poppy's red gown.
I send you whatever I have become tonight.

Let me tell you
about the holly
out the left window,
how it flashes
with silver hilts of sun,
mint buckles
in the afternoon -
I want to share
this with you.
Most of my thoughts
don't reach you anymore -  
annihilated quite gently
by various kinds
of distance.
But in the strange chance
you cross the glass wall
& find these words:
you are adored
more than any holly,
any silver, any sun.

Black Madonna,
gazing from a
golden cage,
the iron-headed night
is heavy with song.
Lifted sleeper
in a shining field,
is your vague
gesture something
like forgiveness?

Today I walked wet streets
strangely sheeted with pennies,

as slant light burnished coil after coil
of hair outside red-***** Macy's,

& the wind pulled open the liquor
doors in the middle of the block.

I missed her as I crossed the blank
green language of grass,

I missed her as I slipped through iron
railings into rain's only face,

I missed her as I hailed the bus on E st
& drifted into a shining glitch.

I lipped a Gauloises and observed
the body of smoke being born.

Then, just before this poem ended,
night appeared in my pocket,

next to the leather and the money,
& it was so hungry, so lonely.

I sheathed the sharpness of my eyes
in pity, and missed her all the more.

My heart is muffled,
buried as if in sea mud
alongside thorned shells
nestled in the slick.

Purple gore rings it
in ribs like tented fingers
as it sits and waits
for nothing in particular.

By drunken prophesies,
libels and dreams,
it makes its needs known.
Like small birds on the wing

spreading wind-wetted seeds
into the endorsing green,
I half-hope that something grows
from this busily clouded chance-chain.

Maybe a small gesture,
made half-way, made in jest maybe,
might root in the red of the soul,
unmuffle the muscle's knell -

but it all passes by -
no one is waving this way.
The floor is an emptying pattern;
the rain is coming, the rain is coming.

The walk from bed
to office is littered
with impatient dogs,
tongues floating
above the brick walk.

Spice trees front the embassy
and lean into the morning's shape.
Each step farther from you
is a ballet of snow
upon the brain.

This poem has moved beneath me.  
No melancholy pang can withstand
a white sail smile.

A year ago I stepped into the green coffin.  
The Grand Canal was so sweet beside my feet,
by the one-winged bridge. Then the ocean
receded, a long sand-salt, beckoning.

Now, I am in the long black river city.
The leaves fall to their little deaths
on the illuminated sidewalk after five.
The twilight bull charges in on deadened fog.

The Wharf's anesthesia blanks out
while new yuppies roast smores in fake fire.
A blue tree shines from the reflection.
Cars park in yellow spots, music dies away.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day
that I flew to the emerald. Now I just air fry
sweet potatoes, listening to old Bowie,
shedding blood into the dead rug.

I miss my green coffin. I laid there so still,
so quiet. I heard the birds and the drunks
in the early morning, crying out; I miss them.
I took the train back from Phoenix Park,

where the cross recited a towering prayer above me.
I walked among the O'Connell shoppers,
the Georgian families, the sweet swans...
I have become nothing at all. Nothing, at all.

There's no more romance
in this February world,
but we can still miss each other
and say little love yous.
Night will still drop on us,
it will still flake away from us,
& I will still curse the distance
from my low, black chair.
I may only be your halfway darling,
but I'll gift you lakes of kisses
until the screen goes dark
& the evening covers my name.
The moon is so still,
like a removed lung.

I still mark your birthday
on my donation calendars,
you know.

Now I'm publishing
fractions of you
from 21 years ago...

But you moved on.
You drafted another
in my place. That's ok -

I'm here to tell you
that although every angel decays,
you have decayed slowest.

How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
-Emily Dickinson


Each body has its own agenda:
Her? Her criss-cross brain flings

scrawls of knuckled candlelight
across the mystery of his face.

Him? His bursting nerves waver,
tremble on the blue patio

where her dress is ascending.
Leaves rug the streets under

coffeed eyes that survey it all
before scoring down the lane.

Murderers must be walking by;
lovers sending frantic texts;

hermits of the plague
smoking furtively in alley skirts.

Bodies are traitors, always asking
for one thing but needing another,

wanting another, planning another.
This body wants hands to find it;

yet pricked with poems,
stiletto-sharp, this body

is browned with night, inhabited
by cascades: is aimed at you.

I read today about a cat in Texas
who was found screaming

& blind, face signed with blood,
rescued under a sun that crawled

through eyelids: flitting, slitted rays.
Small, anguished emblem:

stretched outside the manse,
abandoned by mother and father,

stray, stitched to solitude,
straining to understand.

We are as you were.
O little cat, sweet-armed giants

resolved your misery.
Go chase your little whorls

even as this scant planet
whisks through galaxies

steered by obscured titans.
Behold, friend:

your joys slice at the silence
that once ate afternoons.

Green squares of afternoon
crawl like beetles over the hills.

The wake is through the twig-rush
rising left of silver; I drop Mom

off at the door, park in the back
by an iron whale-mouthed trailer

where the extra chairs are pulled.
Above tightened black ties

old faces float and smile grimly.
Mom braces against the catafalque,

"he doesn't look like himself."
**** gives the speech, carries us all

through the expected meadows.
One cousin is glassy after downing shots

but his brother speaks for both.
Afterward, Mom can't walk well

so I get the sedan and take her home.
Slashes of slick sun wend through

the canopy like blood dripped
into beer - streaming out,

red threads entwining, suspended,
as the whole drink gets darker.

When will we talk
about the leaving?

Walking beneath
the red castle tower?

Across a sandy lawn,
where a glass wisp
moon perches bitten
in the blue quadrant?

Drinking Autumn
down as the new early
night rolls into the air?

No, the next morning,
in the empire of our bed.

The window aches
with excess sun, and
my mouth flakes away.

All the missed opportunities,
the collapsed, balled-up destinies
entwined with small scotch:
the heart misses a beat

when WhatsApp chimes in:
a message from A-----,
who got the wheel moving.
She's had a baby in Dublin,

but is looking to move back stateside.
The whole year waves violently
as it drowns in a Glencairn.
The clouds are fried on a rain griddle,

grease-dark, the outer bands
of the hurricane carcass.
A catalog of dresses sails on down
the long cement string, oblivious.

My little cat sleeps on the red rug,
& my old friend reads the legions
while I pluck at the silver tomb-pall
of my two day shirt.

Turn on the dread lamps,
let the bitter day escape into the vents
of the cyanotic eve - another fell day
chokes itself black into the withered ether.

I was going through
this box I've had
since my father died
it's full of the things
he saved about me
my third grade report
card calling me social
but not much of a rule
follower or my dorm
room clean-out card
all those things but
what tore me up
were all these short
stories I wrote when
I was 17 or 18 and had
these dreams of being
the next Joyce I barely
even remember some
of them but what I do
remember is that dad
always wanted to write
a story together father
and son and kept giving
me ideas to start my half
of it and I never did
I never wrote a ******
word I might have sent
him an idea and then
never followed up and
now he's gone and what
I wouldn't give to just
write a few **** words
for him to show him
I took it seriously and
maybe give him just
that one more chance to
open up and tell me what
kinds of things rested
in the broadness of his mind.

O cloud head, loping with raw rain,
take this breath in your breezy ferry
street by street into the east,
where she sits cradled in lamplight
while fistfuls of autumn's mane
slap across brick dark as sherry.
O cloud head, kneaded and greased
by the blue fingers of humid night,
give over my breath and tell her
I'll be waiting for tomorrow
to reclaim it from her parted lips;
tell her that my brain purrs
with fever, and every red borough
of my body still feels her insistent grip.

The fog has an edge today,
gashing buildings in two,
beheading the tree line,
dispersing the relays.
The sun dies in the east,
throttled by an accumulating
grayness that chews.
Watch the rain approach
on its blacked skate,
drowning the ironbound
fence-work that skirts
the blustered apartments.
This neighborhood
is lost to me -
it chokes and retches
under a slip of sick.
The moon is just
a drain plug.
Wherever I go next,
I will paper with you,
your ink-sugar eye,
the unconscious throne of hair
that throws me over.

H----,
You leave for the broad south
in four days, to rasp a new curl

from old timber. Your destiny
is obliged to subdivide again,

fresh and wild. In the basement
of your goodbye I was filled

with a familiar senescence:
old wreaths, nerve-headed,

are hammered to inner doors
where I hide atomic thoughts

and hot-heart steam valves;
muffled click-clacks ricochet

in a containing pink sarcophagus.
How appropriate that I left

in the melting middle of the rain,
the road seething and spitting,

puddled rugs of mercury skating
across Saturday's lap.

H----, this life is strange and brief
& your escape to far sun country

is high adventure; but I lament
your absence, all the same.
Yours, Evan

In 1992 a major storm tore
the rented beach finger,

ten foot whitecaps yawning
in a horizon of clenched tar.

I walked with mom
through clews of wind

& saw conches strewn
on down the dying strand:

bleached comma fragments
among the bolting towel skins.

The sea was standing there
on foaming legs, fully awake now,

green glass tongues hissing,
a death myth of muscle,

smiles and grimaces
& lolls and swallows,

all at once, synchronous.
More alive than any god.

I made the perishing ride
to the hospital house,
sprays of sumac palling
the spring frame yard -
There were strangers at the table.

I stood my glass,
listened to the black-bagged speech
where the savage girl lobbed
against the terrible slack.
They carried him out.

A year ago today,
I walked the dark canal bank,
water chopping the long stone
as we went to the grocery
& bought wine and meat.

We cooked, fed each other,
as the wind came down
to shake the branch.
My mouth was full of love.
My hands played cat's cradle with fire.

Oh, love: you were a camera,
shutter snapping my best days.
I posed against Wilde's grave,
when the magpie played
with your blue boot.

You caught me against the red trees,
you caught me in the flat green.
You caught me among the rare books
scented with old glue, you caught me
with a Guinness in my hand.

It happened a year ago,
but it could have been this morning.
It could have been twenty year ago.
My life has not moved on, at all.
I see other women and feel nothing.

My Irish and Turkish girl:
What did you do to me?
The swans in the canal glanced my way,
the distillery cooked their malt and grain,
& my life froze forever in a high, foreign place.

Youth

A scent like a sword forged with the acid
of plums found by a road,
the sugary kisses that linger in the teeth,
the drops of life sprinkling on the fingertips,
the sweet ****** heart,
the yards, the haystacks, the inviting
secret rooms in the vast houses,
mattresses sleeping in the past, the raging green valley
seen from above, from a hidden window:
adolescence all flickering and burning
like a lamp knocked over in the rain.

-Pablo Neruda,
translated by Evan Stephens ~1999

The earth is hungry for me.
I feel it in every step,
in the way the green
morning sun grabs
at my sleeve on the platform
when the metro train arrives,
in the gnashing maws
of blooded cloud
that conceal the moon
like a mad aunt.
I've kept it waiting so long,
forty years now;
it caught my father
under the wax-window,
& removed him
to a place in the air.
The lithium salts laughed
& laughed when I found
a shadow at the bottom
of the night-bottle.
I no longer lean out
over the sick, slick hands
of the river when
I go to the waterfront bars.  
I'm still a step or two ahead,
but let's face it -
the tree leers in leaf,
the stones are snide,
& my eye looks so dark
in this whisky reflection.

I fill a prehistorically stained blue seat
as we pull left down Florida Avenue.

In a black pyramid of oversized shirt
a woman spreads gospel from hands

heavy with speaker cones, the chorus
warning all unmarried womens

to look out, look out for the devil.
A man two seats ahead stares out

into blurred spring-raised dusk,
shudders inwardly, cupped with fever -

the college girl who chanced herself
beside him fishes with a worried eye,

edges a thigh into silver aisle air.
Four kids without parents field

strange questions from an old drunk:
"You kids like watching cartoons?

You like them cartoons where pants
fall down and you see some ***?

I know I do" until the oldest brother
huddles them off the bus with a look

cold and hard as winter brick.
As I exit on Belmont, I pass a pair

of construction workers, hardhats
tied to belt loops, fallen asleep

shoulder to shoulder, lulled
by the soft hunt of April thunder

that rides across the slates above,
leading lonely names into the west.

Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.

There's a quaver in the skin
by the blue eye plaza:
Bundy's glittering lips
spread and spread and spread.

We all love a pretty mouth
filled with charismatic teeth
that assure you: all is well.
All is well. Come: get in the car...

No, no, it's alright - it's an actor,
it's a screen, a script -
glass and paper.  
It's not Bundy, it's just Mark:

Mark the UCLA quarterback,
drinks his beer and takes his shoes off
like anyone. But you have to wonder
how sticky the mask becomes.

The empire of the morning
is falling, falling.

The cold wavers a little,
divides, and collapses in colonies.

The sun feints behind acute corner,
advances west at a bicycle's pace.

Crows wag in the mulch,
scrabbling at petals,

cawing at the noon
that stands any moment.

I sit with the book
you plucked from the air,

joyed by it. I hope you call -
I will shave.

My thoughts of you eclipse
every domain of the hours:

the morning's empire dies, but
a confederacy of afternoon is raised,

& already there is a plot
putting forward a kingdom of night.

Flurries fall to green varnish,
grass-toothed jaw. By the time
coffee is ready, their lives
have waned down to water.

You say the same thing will happen
in Dublin tomorrow: Iveagh flake
mounting the park bench,
then deleted by the ineffable air.

The clouds keep dying -
I eye them from this rooftop,
sitting in blue wicker,
living exactly one year
in the past, back before
you took that selfie
in the plane's oculus,
the one I printed out
& put up on the fridge,
on your way to Istanbul.
Covid spit out 9 months
of long distance and maybe
something died between us,
like these clouds die -
softly, slowly, failing
in the early evening.
You entertained someone else.
When I visited Dublin,
you could barely kiss me.
It took ten days
until that toll was paid.
Now you're still in Dublin,
the green city I love so much,
visiting those parks you lent me,
running to the sea
where I bought you a high tide.
I still live in Washington,
so ******* alone,
sitting on this red rooftop
watching clouds pass away,
not knowing when
I'll see you again.
I've given absolutely
everything to you,
so please grant me this favor:
turn your handsome hazel
to this blue chair
where I down scotch
after scotch, and find a way
to save me, because the night
is coming so quickly,
so quickly.

Memories hang
like windchimes in me,
knock darkly to each other -
I carry them with me,
ingots of loss,
stacked steams of grief.
All these memories,
clicking like x-rays -
I take you and gently
add you to them.

I walk in wild
liquor combs
of stag grass,
alleys of fat cubes,
all engraved with
a Cinderella moon
that bows out at midnight.
Under it all,
a grease of solitude:
it's just me, and
these things.
I watch one neighbor
collecting delivery
in the upper dusk.
Another falls
to mattress, in
a lonely window
all of yellow.
Lamps fluoresce,
streaming cruelly,
while cigarettes
float in the dark.
Where are you,
in this?
Thousands of miles
in the rain.

"Je vis assis, tel qu'un ange  aux mains d'un barbier" -Rimbaud
"I spend my life sitting, like an angel in the hands of a barber"

Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.

The sour yellow-white wax
smears bright as feathery snow

towards the westing.
"I spend my life sitting,

like an angel in the hands of a barber."
Clouds are old sailcloth,

gray hunches traded away
at voyage's end in exchange

for a handful of sallow moon.
I am missing a lot of necessary things.

I fill the gaps as I can, but, well...
I let my beard grow out, so that I look

as unwholesome as I feel.
Small birds chirp on branches

bare as flayed phalanges.
If love is man unfinished,

then so is death.
Brown hierarchies ride along

in the early holiday afternoon,
while brick squats off the road.

Here it is, another day.
This one is called Monday.

Here, under a
dead dream,
slurred men
coagulate under
a chord of cloud
that late was
lanced by stone.

Their tongues
cluck with new
noise. Anxious
alphabets rise
in the dust.

Was the tower
a plea? A yearning
to return to God?
Or something
defiant, an arm
extended in theft?

The division of
language is
the birth of
the shibboleth.

To E--,

Sleep flocks east,
leaving sheets clapped,
& yanking back
my unruly dream.
Frost is handsome
in the starry clover,
& an unsteady sun
seems still drunk,
flushed about the cheek,
after columns of Saturday.
I can feel the chill
across the glass
when holly stripes
with stringent wind -
I miss you.
You trouble my mornings
with your absence.
Sometimes when thoughts
are mottled by drowse,
I surprise myself
making coffee for two.
My walls rhyme
with your drawings.
I must wait until
your half of the bed
aligns heady bells again
on a snow-drum Sunday.
I remain,
your lamp-eyed lover,
Yours,
Evan

Hold a name in the air
with the mouth’s moving shadow,
blotting hush clotted there.
Hold a name in the air
it unravels like prayer,
coring the marrow.
Hold a name in the air,
with the mouth’s moving shadow.

My dear,
your laugh's
a telegraph.
It cheers
me in hours
like this,
when bliss
has power
to redeem.
Your smile's
a beam
over sugared miles,
a sweet key -
it makes me free.

i.
The sky grinds
under my heel
& scatters.

When the pool
stills, there's only
your face.

ii.
Below
larch branch,
below
cloud mark -
your words
echo
in my
blue thought.

iii.
Centuries ago
I wrote to you
"je suys vostre
sans de partier."

iv.
Sleep falls
to the floor,
its strings cut
by your hand
running over
my face.

v.
We move
shadow to
shadow in
this maze
of sun.

vi.
We hold hands
as night folds
& folds. Your
hand is soft
as song.

vii.
We make
love under
a coil, a
swan's moon,
a sea disc.

viii.
Autumn
in Paris,
streets paved
orange and red,
& my eyes saying
"want you."

ix.
You know what
champagne does
to me, but you
pour it anyway.

x.
"She was hiding
in lemon leaves
& apple blossoms."
-Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati,
Love Under The Rain, IX

xi.
The rain
in Dublin
makes me
think of
your wet hair
shining in
the doorway.

xii.
I get up early
to start the coffee.
You wake to
the sound of
water boiling.
When I appear
I bring morning
on my lips.

xiii.
Please draw
while I watch
in awe.
Please draw
as ice thaws
in my scotch.
Please draw
while I watch.

xiv.
I'll remove
the paper

butterflies
from your

ears as
you fall

asleep on
the couch,

little dove
in her nest.

xv.
I poach two eggs
for your breakfast,
with quince
& pear. The sun
journeys to us
from yesterday.
The cat's in the
window and
coffee steeps.
Perhaps this
is what lives
are made of.

xvi.
The image
of the nape
of your neck
as you watch
a movie late
on a cold night
full of snow thick
as dough, licked
with wind -
it's irresistible.

xvii.
We're in the
Rothko room at
the National Gallery,
translating white
square, blue band,
yellow over yellow,
black into black.
We move a little
closer together
as the canvases
mirror our
yearning.

xviii.
I read about
old Sumerian
gods, like
Inanna.
She could
never survive
in a world
where you
walk the earth.

xix.
Doing yoga in a
cement chamber
under the city,
muscles shaking.
Grateful for you
amid the ghosts
of streetcars.

**.
We bury time
in a plastic
sarcophagus
right in the
front yard,
casual as
a yam.

xxi.
Ulysses
and you,
the cork
and bottle.

"And then he asked
me would I yes."

xxii.
The smoke
cures the
whiskey.

The whiskey
spills
like tide.

The tongue's
tide seeks
your ear.

The ear
hunts
your thought.

The thought
wafts
like smoke.

xxiii.
Blood peel,
ginger
cumulus,
pink air
like chiffon,
a gloaming
song.

xxiv.
Swans mate
for life.
This wait
is a knife.
Dull rain
over K.
In my veins,
your sleighs.

xxv.
Silver thread
knotted cloud -
the moon's
broadcasting
through the
cindered air.
Your raw sienna
eye captures mine,
& in one moment
the entire night
is abandoned
to your arms.

xxvi.
The twilight
is imperial,
spreading
over that
moment
between
our past
& our future.

xxvii.
I still see you,
brush in hand,
red curving.
You seduced
with every line.

xxviii.
You breathe
life into my
world: the
field of wild
mint, the owls
in the cemetery,
the silver slash
of streetlamp,
the cream Impala.
Everything I see
is filled with us.

xxix.
You're the beat
within my chest.
I feel complete,
you're the beat
throbbing sweet
& I'm blessed -
you're the beat
within my chest.

"Before our lives divide for ever,
While time is with us and hands are free.“
-Algernon Charles Swinburne


There is a strangeness in the air today.
New buds came out on the branch,
green and purple and yellow,
like bruises on old arms.

The sun is gnarled, wrinkled,
folded between ****** clouds
like stringy dough in the knuckles.
The sun doesn't care, it doesn't care

if I'm alive or dead.
It sits in its eight minute perch
in perpetual mockery
of my careful observations.

Someday my dead ash will mock
the fat red belt-bloat of the sun ,
expanded to eat the first couple planets,
maybe even ours.

But no one cares.
If there was ever a lazy, wanton god
who made all this waste,
he or she retreated long ago

to watch these jests from afar.
If there was ever a devil who scourged
the hells with a red hand,
he or she retreated long ago.

Now there are just free hands,
roaming in the salted night
of the inner city boundary.
Free hands can touch what they want.

We are all frozen in time
by our unregenerate desires.
We are free-handed, starry-haired.
We are just lines, wavering.

O, Van Gogh... I am the swipe of wrist
that doubles your ear outside the Christmas brothel.
I am the heart that falls out of your mouth
into the green jelly of the absinthe glass.

The pearl toenail of sky curls and curls
into the split skin of the world.
I stop at the bar on the way to your roses,
drinking aching rye with the bearded bartender.

I aim the gun at my chest - it's so heavy,
all this black metal. My heart is so sick.
The nacreous clouds roil and roil,
& trees turn bus-yellow, taxi-red.

O, Iveagh Gardens... what I would give
to be back inside you, among the secret fruit,
the elephant bones, the faceless statues,
the richest green I have ever seen.

But I am not there. I am in this white hell,
I come from a cancer family. Cells disobey,
clump and grow. Soon I will be the age
of my mother when the breast cancer came

& lived in our house with its chemical face.
When I am ash, spread me in Paris:
even if you must bring your own *****,
dig in Père Lachaise, in a corner,

& funnel me into the brown pit.
Let me rest among Abelard and Heloise,
with Oscar and Edith. Where I strolled
with my heart in my hand, my dead hand.

She lies in bed asleep,
while I shed the deep
shade of my birthday.
My sun's low red leap
is her *****-edge moon.
Tonight I sled steep
drifts of draft, palest ale,
while her head sweeps
her day to dream.
Happy hour's dead cheap
but I go home to pack.
My zee's her zed, heaps
of them for her, I hope.
Evan's heart is hers to keep.

Hundreds of yesterdays erupt like starlings
from the papered heads of trees.

Pumpkin flesh scent on fingertips:
another happy hour come and gone,

flashing lips that meet and fold,
eyes like inverted tusks.

So I seep over the tile like wine
combed to froth by headstone teeth.

They all have hidden hearts
that swim in the lacking pool.

They all clench you close
& breathe your air,

trying to dig up the root
for their private pestles.

No - no! Never that.
I walk the night wood,

where hundreds of yesterdays
roost out of touch.

Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind
which binds the passion.
-Thomas Aquinas

June sun wakes and slowly rakes
its brow, a lemon-clouded reach

that staggers broad-brushed fringe
& stumbles over tenement bustle

awash with sweat and coffee steam.
But under modest morning's facing

flower riots of desire:
bitten lips pout in open windows,

coarse, carnal hands glissando
over fruit in grocery bins,

a stranger's barking blossom laughter
a little too long and loud to be entirely proper...

Even here, where my lover tightens the knots
with one hand, shining scissors in the other.

Drinking four hours now
in a pool hall, Larkin folded
behind me as a I draw
back the cue. Distressed,
lines snap the stroke:
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Not tonight: clouds crawl
on sick bellies to an Alka-Seltzer moon.

But drink gone dead, without showing how
to meet tomorrow – is molded
perfectly to this blind drunk, thawing
beneath breezy transom, getting dressed
for a ride home after going for broke,
drinking anesthesia and losing all finesse
early in the binge, kindly corralled
by patient friends deaf to last call's croon.

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."

Let's spend Fall
in Paris and Rome
while all the stars loll.
Let us spend Fall
in old marble halls
below painted domes.
Let us spend Fall
in Paris and Rome.

Oranges don't grow in the sea;
there is no love in Seville.
Brunette, what a light of fire.
Lend me your umbrella.

I wear my green jealousy
like lemon and lime juice,
and your words,
your sinful little words,
they will swim around.

Oranges don't grow in the sea,
oh love!
There is no love in Seville.


Adelina de Paseo

La mar no tiene naranjas.
ni Sevilla tiene amor.
Morena, qué luz de fuego.
Préstame tu quitasol.

Me pondrá la cara verde,
zumo de lima y limón,
tus palabras, pececillos,
nadarán alrededor.

La mar no tiene naranjas.
Ay, amor.
Ni Sevilla tiene amor!