Gravid clouds dome
the mid-morning

when I'm brought to life,
mouthing your name

like a silk gag
between teeth.

My green-washed skin
dulls in the scrape-light

culled from the flat
of the sky. I'm like

a golem, a mute thing
given rough life,

but who is my maker?
Was it you, lover, who

brushed the breeding
moss from my face,

my lips? Who called
me up from the depths?

Fed me breath, recited
the books of the high air,

until I was yours?
Then why am I so restless?

Will I be cast back
with your fingernail

to the wide quiet pool of ink
where you found me?

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

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

cooling off as the meat rests.
Elbows like tent poles

sunk into pocked bar top.
Thinking about all the Pisces

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

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

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

two marriages on the skids,
hearts pushed through a sieve

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, love, worry not,
it'll go your way.
If it feels for naught,
please, love, worry not,
for all will be as it ought,
and by your side I'll stay.
Please, love, worry not,
it'll go your way.

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

we drummed into each other
with blue Pontiac fumbles

breath skating our necks
& empty loops of denim left

in book-spilled footwells.
Our smiles cooked the dark

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

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

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

with the wet of our eyes,
her fluent periwinkle

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

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

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

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...

You sleep in the beer garden,
while I find a choir
in a blooded cup.
Clouds interlock,
unearthly pinnacles.
You find bread, alka seltzer.
We compare fifteen year plans,
smiling shyly.

Heart's chariot
on its side,

red line ghosts
in the wine glass,

all lost in
the wind locks,

bear the mantle
of blue, blue hours.

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.

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.

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.

Lulled on whisky,
listening to the rain alone -
I'm tired of living
3000 miles from your
bread and salt,
which is to say
I believe in us,
that there are ways
to get this done,
& move the sea step,
clean our slate.
When you smile again,
please remember me.
I am the one waiting
on your smallest fraction,
thinking of you...
it feels like I am always
thinking of you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

New-make maiden, soft as flake,
staring at a flower cake field
as brass-headed bells are bawling:
a cloud’s detonating head rings you.

I have also been reshaped by promises,
& felt the dead-dream weight
across the shoulders. It stings me,
seeing you yearn for the old skin.

A river is ****** inside us,
& grows wider and wider;
the shop registers are singing
after the sun-brunch.

A river is rising within us,
& grows deeper and deeper.
Come, take the tennis court oath with me -
let us revolt in the afternoon.

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.

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.

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.

Out beyond the chilling rain
that crawls along the window pane
you arrive into this city.

I sip coffee and calmly wait,
watch the glimmer of your plane,
out beyond the chilling rain.

The heavy clouds are strangely straight,
and through their splitting throat's refrain
you arrive into this city.

From my body's thin estate,
black capes of breath emerge and strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,

to gather by the open gate
where with your bright campaign
you arrive into this city.

The dawn seems oddly late,
but I know that in this hour's strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,
you arrive into this city.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

You needed
to forget.

In Italy,
you found
a little,
in the
milk
steam
& the hues
of the old
masters.

September
rescued
you from
some of
the blue
slants of
your life.

In the
city of
whimsical
rain, you
considered
Russian
spines,
implored the
shining face
of wine,
searched
in the teeth
of canvas
for that
oblivion.

Love,
I know
the hunt.

I read
Anna
Karenina
by a cast
of moon
on a black
beach,
seeking it.

I drank gin
at sunrise.
I stared long
into the
wavering
systems
of Rothko
and Gorky.

But my
thoughts
erupted
into terrible
poems that
grew from
my hands.

Then,
serendipity:
our friend
pushed us
together
screen to
screen.

A transcript
reveals
the slow
grace
between us,
how the
distance
lilted and
tightened.

Now,
beneath the
gossamer
columns
of the sun,
in the
impossible
mouth
of the air,
I'm thinking
of you
& I no longer
want
to forget.

"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.

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.

We lapped the ice as it came apart,
breathing the thick frost in pieces
that melted in the lung.

We raced. It all caved in
before our eyes, chrome drop,
aching flakes mounted our hair.

Faster, Emily, faster –
loosen the knees that hold flight in them,
as white evening’s fallaway comes.

I quit two miles before. I sat in the car
and watched in wonder as you hit the vanishing point
and became this snow lyric.

My hand thinks
of your hand
when the little mirrors
in the street
are broken by
bibs of rain,
& when the white
box clouds
billow to a steam
cuff horizon  
& when the gray collars
of smoke
stand from
sinuous chimneys
over starched
winged elms -
& when we talk and
compare notes
in the lonely ceremonies
of the afternoon.

Years ago, we went down
to the wheat field, it was freezing,
& we idly plucked some burst chaff
before fumbling against a split rail,
the neighbors all watching
from kitchen windows,
let them watch, you said,
as you kissed me,
knees shaking in the yellow lake.

Economy dusk
of idled exhaust
& worn brick street -
Boston's signature
scrawled with a river.

Traffic's tusk
thru Copley frost -
Pru's moon's fleet
over Boylston ligature.
Wind shaves with a shiver.

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!

Deleted from glass
by water greens,
I slake a gutter
of scotch.
Over the floats
of black holly
galaxies rip
like stockings.
Jealousies clump
in deathbed lanes,
sag across bedposts.
Swiped away,
I eat the dark of the hand.
Sleepless station,
thinned in the wash.

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.

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.

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.

Green wine in the afternoon...
I am flaking thru another Saturday:

a year ago I found you after years
in the milestone courtyard,

you bought me coffee and we compared notes
on the carousel of inadequate lovers

who had betrayed us and vanished,
but never quite vanished enough.

One night, late, I came by
& admired your house.

Then the waters slowly closed in
over me and my mouth crept away.

Now, you cut thru the ether
to recover the string of thought

that passed between us.
Thank you for that -

you have been a spray of stars.
I am the empty space in between.

We talk
late into
the street,
the trees
seem to
come loose
and drift
out into
the night sky.

In the farthest
distance,
galaxies
break apart
into strings
of stars.

You're in
Dublin,
lovely
in your step,
in your voice,
in the stocking
you rip
so idly.

I watch
people
stroll across
the broad
walk of
apricot
stones.

I watch
the dark
green sky
drop centuries
down the
Spanish steps.

I listen
as you
enchant
my phone
with sighs.

The world
is so small,
crossing
the bedposts
of the sun.

The world
is so large,
on the beach
of your
laughter.

"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.

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.

Flurries drop
into the river
just beyond
the Navy Yard.

The flakes divide
at first, but then
the air warms over
the dull marine chop

& they get thick
& woolly and just
stumble into gray
dough-castles.

Snowfall only drops
for a night or two
& then it waits for
entropic days.

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.

Cut and curled,
our brandy faces'
blood-pulled art
lifts and drops
with water moves.

A hundred world
of summer place's
galloped heart,
some teething lops
& dayside loves.

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?

The new stars
keep roving
& the roads rill out
down the hills -
I am so lucky
that you smiled
at my wayward
life, let me
open your grace
with a strum
of my fingers.
I loved you first,
and best - just ask
the wild nets
of new stars -
they'll tell you
everything.

How surreal -
the wind
rustled itself
into my hand
as I spoke
to the girl
across the sea.

She could
hear it
as it purred
in the cup
of my palm.
It followed
me for blocks,
voweled
& agitated.

But nothing
could tear
my ear
from the girl
and her laugh.