"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.

The gaps go all quiet -
the Monday girl
glides brown cloud
down and away
while I walk winter rooms,
looking for a handhold.
Depression fills the mouth.
A whole childhood of rain
slants to snow.

I'm inside the silver
train, whose hard
yaw sway recalls
wristwatch midnights
when you'd pry me
open text by text.

The train chatters
black chisels but
your letters still flow
across the underworld,
where you agitate
with Quixotic chemistry.

The doors slip
against the platform.
As I split the gate,
you remind me that
without a polishing hand
silver sleeps in tarnish.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

You are somewhere between
your yoga mat's page
& the sun-stuttered stage,
balancing geometries,
days rich like honey,
always near to a kiss.

You write poems, and
they stick in the teeth
like sugar and salt.
Your drawings, heavy
with black hatches,
turn the eye over
and over. This,
it's your city now.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 still see you
laying in the balled dark,
moon-pretty,
pinkish ache,
webbed in lash.
I still hear you
& fall in swoon
when you tell me
in Turkish
that your little left hand
is still sleeping.
O darling...
I stand in the doorway
& let my heart *****
to your ghost.
You're here and not here.
How can I sleep like this,
on a bed so pricking with memory?
In this slush of shadow,
this leavened night breath,
your absence feels almost like love.

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.

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 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.

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.

You're sleeping in,
little dove.
Let the day begin
with sleeping in -
It's no sin,
my love.
You're sleeping in,
little dove.

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.

Ah! -
Summer is here -
No, stop -
Something is wrong -
Gray rain collects itself
into chilled coal-water in the road.
Burnt cocoa & cigarette smoke
fill all the engravings of air.
Thunder arrives in bands of purple,
as hawks circle in the twilight,
piercing the configurations of grass.
The mockingbird slips from the holly,
as if embarrassed or ashamed
to be associated with this high fog,
this greenish pallor.
Where are our shadows,
that played upon the brickwork?
The sun refuses to commit
to this dismal June.
Rain begins to fall,
late in the morning,
& all throughout the afternoon.

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.

Stare at the world,
so oddly marine,
with blue-gray air
that hangs in wet sheets.
The breasting wind in curl,
a wave sensed and half-seen,
the lull-quiet despair.
I move slowly, beat by beat,
carving idly the clean pearl
of moon, breathing the green
stopped life, thoughts unfair
but true, that the heart cheats
its owner. I drown in my defense,
in the poison of the past tense.

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.

Who stands off the square?
    The Monday girl,
    blond with rain.
Where have I followed her?
    Through the canyons
    of the eight o'clock city.
And what does this mean?
    I have always felt
    that she knows me.
How alone am I?
    The moon curdles
    and crumbles.
And now that she leaves?
    Embrace the green air triangle
    that spreads out shining
    with wet, fog climbing
    from my mouth as I chew
    cloud after cloud,
    forcing the world to accept
    my abstracting template
    rather than face it,
    face it, that she's gone.

The mind is a constant quarry,
the scrabbled ore of thought
gathered to furnace maw,
deveined, burned out.
Birds wheel, hook, and flurry -
drop the ash seeds that brought
rubble to flourish. Dead rock and raw,
bad teeth in pit’s open mouth,
unwanted dross tells its story –
for every bar of artful iron wrought,
an equal amount is grossly flawed,
discarded, the earth’s wracking gout –
for each cathedral built, for every Gilgamesh,
there’s **** enough to grow a leafing ash.

The battlements stand
but half-built.
Made of wet sand,
the battlements stand
noble and grand.
With sea's salted silt
the battlements stand
but half-built.

Night wedding
on the
mountainside,
flights of tuxedos
in the grass shadow.

I'm watching
from the moss mane
that coils
the monadnock.
Slopes of music
spill against
the tarnishing
puck of moon.

But weddings cease
to move in me,
even now,
seven months
before the divorce.

Gaze out
instead on
the rockfall
where we
backpacked in
cottonmouth July.

Is there an
emptiness
in me?

I sit apart,
dress shoes
shine in
the moon switch,
mountain
a long strum,
the forest
is phthalo.

I melt
down my past
and recast it
into something
better.
Because maybe
the moon
is just
a cinder
crumble.

Maybe the
low-footed mountain
just some angles
in brown.

Maybe all
the deep green
woods are
just trees,
some trees.

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.

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."

Turn the cup
& read the grounds...
Finish up,
turn the cup -
is it the black pup,
that I've found?
Turn the cup
& read the grounds...

I packed it away for the fourth
or fifth time tonight, moving it
between the boxes, cotton cherries
spilling in hands, thinking about the selfie
you sent from the dressing room,
like an audition. You needn't've:
you already had what you wanted.
Now I send the dress back to Dublin
with your other things, because
I don't think you're coming back here.
That thought comes out hard - touches
some places that don't like touching.
I'm wracked long, long into the evening.
Please, come back for this dress -
wear it and come out with me,
we'll go back to our secret square,
just like years ago you can tell me
about the snow brothel again,
I'll eat all your pheromones
& make little moves towards you
in your lover's skin -
white dress with cherries.

The bar is made of rutted plank,
made smooth by skittering
hands of glass. The air?

The air is a pool of static.
Try to forget it. Let chemicals
gently exit the blood.

Talk to sweet Zoë at the bar,
she is a bright bucket smile,
a hot and lovely laugh.

Surfer green crumbles
tumble from the brunch
branch by my neighbor.

I confess: I want love.
I'm hunting it in the streets,
I'm sailing at dawn for it.

It evaporates. I cut my mouth.
Blood swings away, vitrifies.
I am nobody. I am nobody.

The city is brass and ivory
& brick ramparts rising.
I confess: I need you. Need you.

Tonight
the Potomac
strokes the
wing of the
Chesapeake.
Washington
turns on the
lights, goes out
to dinner, catches
up on television.

But in four days
you'll arrive to
break all of it,
& build it again
in your image.

From that frozen
moment in the
terminal - like
an eclipse -
we will count
all the petals
in an eye,
all the clouds
in a hand.

My gravid eye
opens a gaze
on you,
strafes under
grayling cloud,
attaches to a memory
& bites into the
blue-green night
with cigarette teeth.

Then you leave,
skipping across
the undone
waters who calve
cities that split
like onions. Whiskey
beads on your fingers
in the wood-dark bar.

Lover, how you
braid my blood...
Your plural beauty
rests on the elbows
of Istanbul, and
in the same moment
it arrives here,
a splitting whisper
in winter's pavilion.
I crave the crisp
pear of your voice,
the sail's spurt
of your body,
the quiet galleries
of your soul.

So return quickly,
I'm lost in
the night streets
without you.

Lightning spit across the alloy face
of the dishwasher I was filling a half moment

before a high black throat unfastened
with a sunken bellow that scattered rain

like sodden hair along a sheer pane scalp.
Hell, a storm? On New Year's? What an insult -

because it's been a long year down
for the lonely and eroded angels, the poets

whose orchestras of synapses decay gently
into fresh stanzas. I don't know about you,

but my inbox was a chorus of No, No,
Not You, Never You. It ate me

inside out, but I pressed on in new poems,
both mine and yours - I stumbled blindly

into rooms full of your renewed voices -
reassuring me that silence is not the way.

These are not poems, you all told me -
they are beacons, telegrams, phone calls,

they are pleas, they are screams, they are alive
like the cursive lightning scrawl that paints

the kitchen and bids me stand up straight.
It's been a long year but I came here to say

my mouth is filled with thank you;
strange friends and colleagues, thank you.

To all of you, and your hard work this year.
Your poems were read, and remembered.
Thank you for all of it. It changed me,
for the better, and was appreciated.

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.

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.

Your old card,
"You're My Person"
creases in my hand.

The note is so sweet
it ruins me; my nose
spots blood, I cry so hard.

Even if I put it down
& only touch it
with my mind

it wrecks the afternoon,
a hammer-handle
between the eyes.  

Yet I can't even file it away,
still less remove the pastel
from the black chess mantel.

It's part of me,
stowed deep in the heart,
like a blade the doctors
are afraid to remove.

I also sent cards,
filled with adoring scrawl,
Turkish slices,
raw pianissimos of love.  

I wonder if they split you, too.
I don't know what we are,
only how I feel -

you are the root
of gladness.
My hair still burns

when I think of you.
I am committed to the dark
chancels of your thoughts.

I may be shackled to the white blot
of Washington, but the blood
specking whorl and loop
erupts from Dublin.

Consider this, then,
another card,
sent to you across
cerulean cavity

all the way to your
necklace of river.  
You're my person.

As always, my honey,
I close with
kisses and hugs,

knots and crosses:
"xoxoxo"

I hold out my face
to the society of her gaze,
while a dusk erupts
to a three day blow,
& chapels of snow
jilt into soot knots
beneath a cruel
broadcloth dune.
I hold out my face -
but now to an absence.
Thousands of miles
sway in the poplars
before flying away,
away from me.

I can't help you
where you are.
The apple crown
of summer is stuck
in my humid lung
and words dry
out on the line.

It's fine to be quiet
together. When our
arms cross my Sicily
is ten shades darker
than your Istanbul.
I inhale the silent sun
and run it through
my teeth like yolk.

I hardly know what
to say. I'll be your
flying buttress, your
Pegasus wing, your
silver brace, even
as the kingdom
of my words falls
into string.

I just found
your writing
in the book
you lent me
after we met.

Your name
chokes me away
as it declines across the page
where you signed it,
claiming it.

O darling,
come home,
& take this pen.
I'll lay still
as you assert
your name over me
in your beautiful hand,
rift to rift.

---

I read your notes
one last time
before packing them
for Dublin
with your H&M scarf,
your New York sketch,
some paintings
I'm hoping you like.

In the dream my wounds
were bandaged with
chains of paper dolls.
Each doll had "4, 11"
written where its eyes
should be.

It was my childhood house
but every room empty
& dark. When I went out
into the yard the front
of the house had a sentence
across the brick:
"They will not fill it."

There was no sound
anywhere except
my breath. When I
went back inside
I opened the oven
and saw a coffee mug
holding all my baby teeth.

The car in the driveway
held four scarecrows.
The television was dead.
The picture frames
all held the same photo
of me facing away.
Just before I woke up
I walked downstairs
to the fireplace and
in the ashes I heard
my own voice say
"not yet."

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.

"Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible--
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait--bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life."
-Gregory Corso, "Marriage"


To Whom It May Concern:

Three years ago I was supposed to marry
for a third time, but disease came
& courts closed and the house of cards
began shaking: aces are thin.

Two years ago it ended savagely
as I was packing my things for Dublin,
looking up how to get the cat on the plane,
when she texted: scalpels are thin, too.

I began drinking. Not like the books say -
the lonely poet sipping sherry in a turret,
in a black cape with a quill in hand -
no, ugly cups of scotch at eight in the morning.

The whisky brought my grandfather's body
from the past and forced it onto me -
I stopped recognizing myself
in the poisoned mirror. I sold the house.

I bought a new place, in an artist's neighborhood,
I went for long walks, I purged some bad blood.
But the heart ran down like a forgotten watch.
I felt tarnished. I felt like I died years ago.

Now whenever a poem slips out of me,
I am dismayed. The world around me
reflects endlessly a cascading loneliness,
a disappointment, an uncertainty,

& it's all I can talk about because looking in,
breaking the lacre, is unbearable most of the time.
Clouds sing and perish in the new night;
when day comes, it's sodden, sealed, sunless.

I don't know where else to go with this letter,
so I will scrawl my fingers across the clatter
& go lay down. The street is spotted:
It's starting to rain.

v/r, E-

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.

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.

Dad died not far from here.
Now the evening lays a red carpet

of old leaves for me, a wet welcome,
stamped all down the walk.

I think about Dad, and also Her,
the one who slipped her thin words

into the spaces I was saving
for children, or something.

Those words erased me.
Dad's death erased me.

I was rebuilt in a new image,
scrubbed out with the side of Her hand.

So now what? I grew my hair out,
trying for a new look. I am running,

reshaping the whisky fat.
I am a scream. I am a scream,

piercing the black hood of night,
washed away by this new one.

The new one is no answer,
she's been burned the same way.

I visit my oldest friends, boys I knew
in the lunch line, the school yard:

they are full of ancient pain,
cooked into them, no escape.

I'm near the hospital where Dad passed
into the air. Who knows where we go?

The forest closes in. The sky dies.
Houses collapse into bone and mortar.

I am alone tonight, can't you tell?
Where are they all? Where are they all?

We were
ending
and you
were
afraid
of it
so you
preserved
me like
wine.

Macerated
my heart -
soaked it
in your
words
until
it was
soft,
the pulp
you
wanted
leeching
from
the rest
until it
floated
to the
top
to be
skimmed
lighter than
a throb.

I imagine
the heart,
emptied,
was
supposed
to leave
of its
own accord,
a slump
of husk.

It didn't,
so you
boiled
it away.
It left
on New
Year's eve
down
Chesapeake Street,
a self-loathing
gap in
the air.

Drink, then,
and taste
everything
that made
me what
I was.