We slip-stepped
past snow sprigs
in Iveagh Gardens
to a castle of bread,
cheese, and red wine
topped to pink shell lip.
We talked a whole world over.

Yet two months after,  
you-don't-love-me:
though I know I felt it
glowing in that rose cage,
saw it on a wine-painted mouth
that smiled at me,
a smile of retrieval.

Remember the day
I met you at the airport
in July, at the start
of the four best months
of my life? Your eyes
carried the same regard
for me then, I swear it.

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."

Bold girl's
gold curls?
Cold whorls.

Brunette's
new bet?
Fool's debt.

But dark hair
sparks rare -
marks pair.

Blackly digging in the ten o'clock hour -
the rain already came and went -
the District is dying of moon-steam,
a summer that chokes even the princes of air.

I am mortally alone. My chaperone,
a brimming glass, turns a blind eye
to my piling thirst. Pylons of shadow
gather in the alley like barren trees.

My monstrous shirt clings to me,
accentuating the beer-pounds.
I pray for a swift end to this grit-grind,
a legacy of revolving abandonment.

Numb, dulled, I stare out at the sparse
traffic cleaving to the bitumen, red lights
& bare legs floating by in the wheeling hour,
tone poems of pale flesh and sad laughter.

This is very close to the bottom:
the scotch that scrapes my tongue clean,
the freshly washed glass, the beckoning bed
that promises only dead dreams,
                                                          pillows of sand.

Bruisy clouds slouch across a grayed glower
on a brisk, anesthetized Tuesday.

All these people, coming and going on the walk,
ignoring the sobs of the frayed man who digs

squelched cigarette butts out of the mulch
packing the dead-headed elm at the bus stop.

I cook a small lunch that threads the studio
with citrus fingers, above the coal painting

that dries flat on the Sicilian game table,
but my mind is elsewhere. I am thousands

of miles from this bricked-in niche where scotch
and stout stand sentinel on the granite bar:

I am walking step by step through Lansdowne,
past the silent salt-nose of each slate-slanted house,

on my way to the sand where the power plant
reaches upward with muscled black arms

so that even the froth withdraws into a curtain
of coming rain... strange, always a gray rain,

that comes so quickly. It heavies the sweater
of the yellowed dog-walker, steadies the rasp

of the cigarette digger, peppers the mirror
that spreads its silver shell across the asphalt.

This littling rain calls me back from Sandymount
and its endless bench. The black paint is dry now,

& the old year has died, flung to the floor like a rag
you cough into when you breathe the wrong way.

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.

"Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up"
-Richard III, Shakespeare


The sky is a bland face of gray linen,
a faded shroud-scrap, a broken nail
of moon lost in the bedsheets.

My friends live in the black skin
of the phone. They are lost gloss.
Golden windows swell and crack

with light in the early May eve.
Lager, sherry, scotch: dogs sniff
the dead things in the street.

I am a tenth of a soul. Unfinished
in this breathing scar, this scorn,
scarce half made. I am a tenth,

or less. I am sunken, buried
in the broad ash water.
My brown eye is custard.

I sink into my chair. What happened?
The night has slipped away.
The moon is lost in the sheets.

Ah, burning wine,
how welcome you are,
when the black static sky
crackles with cold.
Brown noise in throat,
rye seed glow,
slow unguent
of gentle forgetting.  

I've lost the shine,
surface marred
then polished high,
the flaws are old
as my childhood coat,
lost in the woods' green dough.
Ah, brennivin, you have no judgment
for my ritual bloodletting.

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.

Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. -Ahab, Moby ****, Hermann Melville.

The winter's body shakes in little slops
that beat against the window, sloping
upward out of the dead-leaf carousel
into the black sheet-fold of cares.

I shaped my life around someone who is gone.
Therefore I have no shape - I am a vapor,
a bolting-breeze, a formless sherd of glass
freed from the vandalized car window.

Every breath is glassy, an anesthetic
that numbs me to the next one.
Every beer and scotch liberated from the cabinet
helps me drift toward a wet oblivion...

What now? What now?
I don't struggle with dollars or dolls,
preferring instead the silence of the studio,
the slow march of ink across the face of it;

it snowed this morning.
My heart gave way. I opened the window
& let the frost enter the bed:
the scent of bitter coffee floods the air.

Kite-flying in late April
is new love:

You take a thin string and run
forward until wind comes

to cast it into the upper reaches,
climbing with new life.

You can try to reel it in,
but mostly it follows

unseen impulses.
You can cut the string

& let the clouds eat it,
or rein it back until

it protests against the hand,
& sometimes a branch will take it,

or another kite will cross,
& give you a new string to deal with...

But while it's aloft, how true,
how just is that small parcel against

the powdered square face of sky,
riding a breath into the free rising?

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.

Tell me I'm not here, alone -
that I've finally traded this broken meat
for vapor, a stock-share of memory
that wavers through the dusk screen
into a charry blued imbuement -

For a moment, I'm by the riverside
in Paris, eating bread and wine with her,
a small and stony autumnal Eden.
Now I'm dying in Saint-Eustache,
craning my neck into the god-vault...

O reader, I can't lie to you:
I am here alone, after all.
This blood-ended prison twitches
with memories of Les Halles
& Tiquetonne, and that's all.

Paris was, not is. What "is"?:
Medusa's severed head in a cake box;
an anchor of whisky nestling itself home
in the cold iodine of the soul;
my name dissolving into a beard of ash.

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.

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"

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
          Heart

And in the late afternoon
I wanted to be a nightingale.
          Nightingale.

(Soul,
wear an orange color.
Soul,
wear the color of love)

In the living morning
I wanted to be myself.
          Heart.

And in the falling evening
I wanted to be my voice.
          Nightingale.

Soul,
wear orange!
Soul,
wear the color of love!

*

Cancioncilla del primer beso

En la mañana verde,
quería ser corazón.
Corazón.

Y en la tarde madura
quería ser ruiseñor.
Ruiseñor.

(Alma,
ponte color de naranja.
Alma,
ponte color de amor)

En la mañana viva,
yo quería ser yo.
Corazón.

Y en la tarde caída
quería ser mi voz.
Ruiseñor.

¡Alma,
ponte color naranja!
¡Alma,
ponte color de amor!


by Federico Garcia Lorca
translated to English by Evan Stephens

Something withers in the gut;
a light goes out. Air dribbles down,
down, settling in the soles of my feet.
I'm alone under the wing negative.

The seething mottle of clouds
brushes past, old bruisers.
I am trapped down here,
in the memory cycle that lurks
inside all the glassware.

Everything that came before
seems like it happened to someone else.
There is no after; slices of globe
are dappled by thoughts that get lost
in the salt-surf marrow. Rain claims
an errant soul with bolt-iron drops.

I dabble with shadows,
eating them like hors d'oeuvres,
but nothing's enough for the broad yawn pit.
A green altar sways in the vowelish breeze,
a light blinks on, but suffers back blank.
Imperfect things, loving imperfectly,
sweep down the road, thin as eyelashes.

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.

Your hair shakes
with a debt of stars.

City night can't
pass blue, and the

coin cloak moon
escapes its room

with a key made
from a rose thorn.

You lay into the bed
clad in pink silk,

black lace, your
skin fair as a page.

There is a breeze
that sounds like rain.

I dare to read your
emissary shoulder

& become dizzy,
my breath broken

among my teeth.
You could be made

of engraved silver
and I would not

be more speechless
or more delicate.

Shake the stars
from your hair,

so that a midnight
might curl there.

Light the little candles
bright as thighs

and join me here
by the window

sipping your whiskey
and watching clouds

chase a truant moon
towards the gigantic

green lacuna of
Grant circle.

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.

Arm's ray,
leg's root.
Deep fold,
sacral route.
Turn away,
plant foot.
Breathe, hold,
hold, out.
Triangle's
reach -
I find it there,
in these angles -
skin's speech,
bone's prayer.

This dim rain stall,
cleated to a Friday,
stuck at half mast,
gray as an ash smear,
as an illness:

it's the hour to slip away,
sling down the wet road
to find newer bones,
fresher thoughts,
beyond this empty dooryard.

No more sullen hearth
gapped with chill:
step through the ring-necked
steam by the high cloud wall,
with a proper heart

that's open for business.
Pry loose the evening
like a wisdom tooth
from the silver city jaw.
A foxed blur hangs

in the spangled hedge:
It's a yesterday.
Turn your back to it.
Say yes to their hands,
say yes to their eyes.

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?

Cool Hand Luke has permafrost eyes
as he smirks down the fiftieth egg.

Lawrence doesn't mind that it hurts,
holds up a match and blows out the sun.

Frank Booth huffs his gas, "now it's dark,"
& new parents replace the old ones.

The lights come up, the professor
steps to the lecture square, underneath

the once-flickering wall's altar wing,
& gathers thoughts like garden stems.

Some of us were baptized into celluloid,
we opened our eyes and were submerged

into a breathless 100 minute night,
a wilderness of grayscale myth.

Charles Foster Kane dies today in Xanadu:
his life shuffled for us, as if it means something.

You know me
almost accidentally.
But when the night blows out
& the little secret garden
is filled with small rain,
it's your eyes I want
looking for me.

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.

Drinking blind pilots with my neighbor
until black poppies swim down to meet us.

Dusk-dander lilac's blocked, banished
by jejune faces that caw and crow,

birds bursting with post-paid
parcels of tattered laughter;

we flee to the bottle shop, retrieving
sweet vermouth in the nick of time.

After that, it's poppies, poppies,
poppies all the way down.

"Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea."
-Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

Under the involucres of yard hazel
I stopped your water when I was ten -

bent over the hidden pump stock,
I unscrewed the round rusty skullcap,

& felt the living nests of wire in my fingers.
Your father was patiently furious

in the fresh dooryard of the old farmhouse
where we played the Winnie the Pooh game.

Twenty years later we briefly crossed paths,
but my then-wife hated you -

you were pretty, clever, lustrous,
your hands full of sly flat smiles.

You threw me Belle and Sebastian -
you'll never know they are my favorite,

because you slid onward to Vanderbilt,
god only knows where you are now.

You escaped into a life,
I flattened under one.

Your imagination stuck me like arrows.
Your voice was glossy with cat-dreams.

You are a comet - you visit twice
in a lifetime, and always leave me astonished.

"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-

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 stars are out:
rhinestone belts
frozen mid-lash.

The wasp-wax sun
broke its last crutch,
sleeps behind the hill,

& the smeary bone-pocks
of moon are slouching
silently overhead.

We are inhabited by the dead.
They live inside us, smoking calmly,
like a recently fired gun.

The vapor is carving its way
toward the envenomed starlight,
yellowed drips, old waves.

This humid umbrella, pinpricked
with the soft vacillations,
briefly covers us both:

we huddle under the winding,
thousands of miles apart.
Your river laps against the stone,

my river floods the pine path.
We chat about lost cats.
Stars are dying despite our spells.

A shadow spread over us
as we lay there in the fields.

It ate flower, grass, and hill
with ohaguro teeth.

The world was soft and chilled
in the belly of the shadow -

we hid our hands
under each other's shirts.

When it moved we chased,
laughed among blonde furrows,

stumbled in the gritted ruts -
but it was gone. I think

we both know what it meant.
Where are you, now?

It is six fifteen in the morning
when you call me,
worried that I'm not well.

I hold you in a little tired slice
of choke-glass blooming
in an smear-eyed hand -

I face you with all my blotches,
try to splint the break,
to be where you are.  

Maybe you're right -  
your love undoes me.
The hours are pauses, aches,

each more or less intolerable.
If my heart slumps away
one of these smoked spring nights,

an unbeating gore-stump,
carry me back to Dublin
& spread my ash-seed

in Iveagh Gardens,
where I carelessly left a dream
among the cane apple husks.

Drink whisky
& recite one of the hundreds
of poems I sent you

to the water-ruined statue
near the rose cage;
maybe someday you'll be curious,

and find the ones I never sent,
filled with sorrow's rennet,
sour-salted, reeking of rain,

retch-cairns
to the halved honeycomb-husk
it seemed like we were becoming.

So of course I both live and die
when your ****** chime
breaks my false, papery day:

I love you above all things,
even now, when you turn half away -  
I don't think you will turn back -

but are you really done here?
Are the white lilies really dead
in the bleachy vase?

This is not what I wanted -
the black wing, a door closing -  
I am living the wrong life.

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.

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.

Bone in the branch,
right on the face of it,
embedded symmetry.
Tillerman's lawn chain
in a dead leaf choker,
garbling the sway.
Maple skim dip,
a patch of buttresses,
pooling October.
Inert array,
flicking cardinals,
shoal's chaotic mural nose.
So many days like this day,
indistinguishable,
crushing.

Their eyes slash
like small fish.
I curl away,
ribbon against
the scissor arm.

Forget it, you won't
get blood from a stone.
**** therapists
press their steam.

Tongues hold, even as
words break away.  
Just wait them out, wait
them out, wait them out...

The orangish streetlamp breeds sick spots
that stick to the gray street; the cubist bus
throws yellow beams into the insect air;
the humid black collapses like a bad hand
into small pyramids of dead cloud;
gel-bleached eye-fillings branch out
from the faces of strangers, full of vinegar,
unfriendly, averted. This glass of ***
is dark flecks on a hollow. The night-face
rotates slowly with metallic disease,
old scars that shine in the uncanny swell
of dust that breaks loose in the children's mulch-park.
She is long, long gone: a tomb-scrape in Paris,
a walk to a cafe where the yellow liquid waits;
I stalk through the stars, and then die up there.

Let me warn you,
this poem says
                           nothing.

A half-inch of snow
fell in the yard?
I'm compelled
to record it here
for reasons unknown
even to myself.

The clouds are dark
and frothing?
That's nothing new.

What do rough
cumulus lips
mouth in the
upper distance?
Look up, peer
as snow-hills
melt into self-loathing.

By the way,
this poem merely
turned skyward,
it still says
                   nothing.

I watch your legs -
not the denim or flesh,
but the long thigh bones

as they glide above the chevrons,
flourishes above the tile,
cursive scrawls in the wet air.

Strange thought, I know.
I cannot account for it.
My sister sends you regards

from New Jersey's Starland.
You smile with sweet tolerance.
Mezcal courses through my face.

Happy hour is ending,
& with it, my tenure in your kingdom.
I am cast adrift once again.

The moon is full tonight;
gravid, a white bursting.
It sings into the palms of my hands.

O bartender, bartender,
with your good posture:
who am I? Who am I?

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.

You fill the world
with secret meaning -

for example,
these small wisps,

these puffballs
that meadow to

dandelions,
Once they carried

my wishes.
They would scatter

on their strange
sails and raise

the yellow brightest.
But then,

you and I
we watched Amarcord

where puffball
swing seasons

into town,
salt a wedding,

mark the limits
of memory,

of childhood.
Now I see them,

gracing across
the fields

& yards
& I think

automatically
of you.

Mickey and I rounded the house
to an orange pool wrestling
with an aluminum gloam,
deck chairs and log quarters
stacked in the yard spread
against the high house,
Maryland night bent through
the gate rings, and whiskey
seeds come toll.
After twenty beers,
I fell on my side,
retreated enough to throw up
alone, sedate rectangles
over speeding asphalt.
Dazed, I wandered inside
& found the girl
in the water heater room,
pink bra under bare bulb,
feasting on the joists.  
Mickey drove me back.
My sister was on the phone, laughing,
while I sat in the stitch of my room
waiting for an axe handle lullaby.

Sgailc-nide - the first morning drink, taken while still laying flat on your back

A caustic belt of autumn sun
flings itself through the glass,
yolk wasted across the blood-rug.

Last night's final slug
of scotch sits waiting
on the blackcloth nightstand.

I gather it into my fist,
take a look at the blue syrup
of morning light...

I will tell you all
that the first morning shot
glows like a new blind heart.

This future is mad with silence,
while the past asserts itself
in lost faces, so many lost faces.

I have a bruise on my face
that I can't recall getting.
I don't remember the evenings,

although last night I cut my hair
with a rattling metal hand
that sharped at the skull.

Each morning is a scrape.
I don't recognize this lonely man
in the acid sluice of mirror.

Ginevra de' Benci
has a sullen mouth,
a hooded eye, a cheek
that betrays a cerise

blush creeping from
chestnut curls, her face
is petulance and command -
she's secretive as water.

She loves you,
she leaves you,
you'll almost throw
yourself from the window...

Ginevra has cruelty
hooked on her face.
In that frozen glare,
desire and anxiety mix.

What other feelings,
underneath porcelain wash,
were caught mid-blossom,
fixed there forever?

There is a cloud over Yorkshire...
it brings burst speech in the evening.

The grass is bending in the rain;
a fine fog slips goodbye like window fingers,

leaving behind a shining extract.
We're on the viscous edge of night,

straying into dim, broken hellos
that dissolve us like a companionable acid.

We cook our meals quietly tonight
in black aprons of lonely air.

The silver of the blade is dwindling.
Stars blink like vacancy signs.

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.

My hands of old snow
are pulling down drafts
of brick-blooded sloe.

The TV's glass glow
is hard as a haft
in my hands of old snow.

Night thick as a dough,
bleeding moon like a shaft
of brick-blooded sloe.

Slip the man what I owe
in black dollars that laughed
in my hands of old snow.

Face bright from the blow,
a drunkard's witchcraft
of brick-blooded sloe.

This tired old show
again autographed
with hands of old snow,
of brick-blooded sloe.

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.

Rolling mint
hillock
of Ashland,
estate of my
grandparents,
where I curled
dreams
into the blue
room's sheets.
Honeysuckle's
ladder up
the brickwork
reached like
spring fingers
towards
my window.

From brown
shadows I saw
foxes steal
over the
crumbling
drive. Clouds
crashed
into trees,
deer ate
lawn in
the evening,
uncle's autos
coruscating
in the tall
grass wilds.

In that bed
I came of
age with
thoughts
of women
naked -
Torches
of thought
ached and
led the way
deeper
& deeper
as they dripped
scalding tar
all across
my adolescence.

Years went by
inside me.
Stones fell
from the sky,
hard as ***.
Fox bones
slept
in the wood.
The television
sat like
an idol
on the lace,
a pressure
that touched
every wall.

The sun
a chorus.
The moon
a thigh.
Something wet
rustled in the
eye that
burrowed
beneath
the pillow.