I don't always know when
I'm being loved - early years come back
to bite. You make this easier -
second guesses die on the vine.

All that's left for me to
wonder is what to tell
you when I'm feeling this tinge
of melancholy.
Do I report from "the Century"
to tell you about the two bottles
of Dark Horse I've put down,
celebrating the wild Derby
where the winner was nixed?

Or do I broadcast the sea curl
& salted air that pass your
name dune to dune in the
wild grass, as night eats
my cigarette and flicks sand
into my hair?  

Neither -
instead I blush toward
the evergreen stoplights as we talk -  
smile the little shells
that break the walk.

I sigh, go inside,
have a little Turkish lesson -"su ve süt"
& maybe that is enough.

The great key is twisting in the lock -
the keyhole moon is spinning.

Empty bottles rise like grass
from the ceramic tile.

The scattering people on the street
slice little hunks of joy

from the black slab
that squats over the city.

The sky is vacant,
the stars vacuumed away

so casually, replaced
by a fat cobalt shroud.

The scents of gin and ****
finger up through the humid cloak

before disappearing from human record.
This bed is a pit of silence,

a soft red hell, a place
for lonely drunks who turn the world,

waiting for her to come round,
come round, come round.

At twenty five
I threw myself
through bonfires,
looking for a
life beyond the
wood smoke angel.

I would drink
a tenth bottle,
& curse the heart
repeating like a
stuck needle
in the black
groove of years.

Past the burning
rye at the edge
of the wood
cars never stopped
moving, white
pulses dropping
into the well of
the far distance,
folding into the
yellow chambers.

I cancelled myself
quietly on the dark
porch corner
in the watery night.

Then a dozen
years were thrown
across my life.

It's not possible
to explain everything.
But know that I
played roulette
with the sun.

I broke the moon
with song
& repaired it
with verse.

I filled my palms
with grass
& drank the
greenness.

I hurt, terribly,
a breaking sleep.
I lived underneath
a residual shine.

And then you,
my ace of cups.

I lay in the
secret rectangle
while you told
me of the snow
brothel.

I watched metal
birds slouch
the sky.

I walked
the theater
of the lawn
and found
you laughing.

Darling,
those years delivered
me to you like a
letter.

If you
unseal me,
everything you
find inside
is yours.

The oak died
in the last

baseball year,
thick dollars of rot

splitting the crook
with a winter step.

I had given up
on Kelly from

Corner Drive,
old enough now

to let go of
the desire in

her Lions
nightshirt.

**** moved in
next door, saving

me from
mother's cancer.

The sun was a
gnaw, I lived by

nightfall, engaged
to the femoral

moon. ****
played drums,

his father
chain smoked, and

I hunted the changing
braid that filled

the wooden air.
It was another way

to be, exile from
the sick-house,

eating the words
of books,

replacing
the things I had

been denied.
The sick oak lay

like a vacancy
in the center of the

yard, too far gone
even for firewood,

black ailerons
down in the wetness

of the mantle.
Lord,

I could barely
even look at it.

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.

We
laughed
& it was
nighttime.
That was
only
the first
part.

The
perfect
row
of your
hair
& your
easy
head-thrown
smile
was the
second
part.

The tour
through
the
house of
questions
& the
gilded
sea
was the
third
part.

One
call
& 3,379
miles
were
rescinded,
their
power
extinguished
by the
eyes in
cameras.

Your
heart,
beautiful
heart,
was the
final
act of
magic.

Red choir,
brave
& vulnerable
ache,
apple
of grace,
lilac
shadow -
draw
me in
& hold me.

The
Dublin
strand
is papered
in wind,
my old
book
renewed
into
romance.
I love her.

Pen
scratches
the
whole
page
black,
& variant
sprawls
of my
name
repeat
until I
own a
house.

Sister
& I
in dad's
old car
head
up to
Petworth,
& walk
back
under
a sky
that
rolls
& folds,
a bolt
of cloth.

Break
new trees
on the
prison
island,
handcuffs
of ivy,
jump
the fence
& escape
to the
highway.

In
Georgetown,
lush reeds
wave from
the canal
bottom,
easting
in the
chartreuse.

Then cross
to Dupont,
thronged
with
day-enders
and students
shifting
from
coffee to
*****
as the
hour rises.

Scheherazade
cancels,
but I make
the best
of it,
writing at
the bar
next to
the girl
in leatherette.

The day
ends
with me
fighting
the pharmacy
of my
sleepy
blood
while I
break
the bed
I always
hated
and
throw it
into the
orange.

Day's done.
Another
year to
come.
Thinking
of her -
sleep.

Push back black bath of sleep;
I have these 3 am shakes.
I hear the water skin
moving in the next room,
drops of cotton coil to cold leg,
& salt lamp cracks on,
pink broadcast against the hour.
Dreams retreat on the board;
the moon swims in the frost.
Where are you?

They could seed
the clouds
with silver
in the high distance
until the sky,
hard and shining,
sent lacing rain
to drop at each
of our feet, 5,214
miles apart.

Miles of sea floor
& mountain back
sleep between us.
Miles of birds,
miles of laundry
on the line.
Miles of great aunts
smoking cigarettes
on the stairs,
miles of mice
slipping through
high grass.

If it seems far,
close your eyes,
because miles
drop quickly
in the dark;
you proved this
to me long ago.

They could seed
the clouds with
silver, but they won't -
instead I seed your
eye with this lyric
until it rains
inside you.

Across the initialed table,
thin-limbed within
a pink NKOTB sweatshirt,
flicking pencils at my lap,
nest of blonde hair glowing
under the humming ballasts
of the lance-long bulbs,
she still perches, smirking slyly.

I can't shake her.
She is installed somewhere
I can't reach. I remember
all my childhood crushes,
but only this one is so vivid.

She invited me to her birthday,
at her house, knowing I liked her.
She fawned over a boy
from a different school.
Every poem I've written
about her names him: Adam.
I cried in her yard, bundled inward,
went quiet, waited for my mother.
On the ride home I stared
as the green fields striped by.

She grew up, married,
started a family. I kept track
only through hearsay.
When she died in childbirth,
I surprised myself by crying.

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.

The white flowers
will not arrive
by stallion, nor
by lightning.

The stolid courier
will knock, a door
swinging; a suitable
place prepared.

In the cold district,
the exploded heads
of trees look back at me:
why didn't I save them?

Even the sun seems lopped.
But in the face of it
I will stand, have coffee,
& be reminded of you.

It's 6:30, and the sky
turns a spoiled milk shade
before tripping
in its hurry to arrive.

"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.

Glowing metal
is taken directly
from a forge
and thrown
into a sea.
The blue
steaming
salt-hiss:
her eye.

While her plane taxied,
I had already entered a sort

of personal sarcaphogus,
built to contain the click

click click of this radiation -
errant atoms in caustic traces

throughout the salted air.
It's a mechanism, keeping

me sane in the face of
this sorrow of her exit -

I walk in dazes, and joy
falls away in strips

like bark from a sickly tree.
So I count the minutes of the days...

Machine riot pink
stone light sails
velvet bay blink.

Ice lynx ink
black trunk rails
machine riot pink.

Jade earl sink
shyly arc pails
velvet bay blink.

Chair hollow think
hint blinded gales
machine riot pink.

Reverse zip drink
plum brass wails
velvet bay blink.

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

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.

The simple sun today
just aches away.
I go outside,
bloodshot-eyed
with trembled lip,
& join the withered pip
on a whisking walk
to break away from surface talk,
to escape my vacant nest,
the closing tightness in the chest.
When I'm back I yearn
for your return
from the green,
the awful, awful green.
But I would take the green
with a smile if it would mean
I'd be with you,
no hopeless queue.
But today? The simple sun today
just aches away.

"If I cannot bend the will of heaven,
I shall move hell."

Meadows of blood
are sluicing from my arm,

& courts of lithium
are bottled neatly.

This stream within me,
the red subliminal, latent,

needs beating back.
The noon sun kicks uselessly.

Something happened,
it had nothing to do with me,

it had nothing to do with
quiet cancerous woe,

nothing to do with the
underside of my mind.

I am quiet in the chair,
the blood-taker smiles at me

through alcohol bouquet,
compliments a yielding vein;

the blood pours and pours,
aching with subconscious.

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.

It flickered in the air,
sagged branch to branch,
pushed against the windows:
a death was pulsing.

It spilled into the streets
of my hometown.
I opened an old phonebook,
the names were humming.

I was cut to pieces by it.
I knew her as a little girl,  
she knew my sister
in her hippie period.

The telephone lines cowered
beneath the gray massing of moon.
The faces of houses screamed
ceaselessly at me as I drove.

It is so insistent,
her sixth-grade smile
in my old class photo.
It hovers inside me.

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!

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 remember you
& that rebel C
of blonde hair
by your ear.

You let me
tuck it back,
even after you knew
I liked you.

You were fourteen
& your world
was engraved
in italics.

When I cut myself
for reasons
I couldn't speak to,
you understood.

We were exiles -
but I always had
the impression
you found me

too safe to date.
Oh, how you were wrong -
an irony, for
you spared yourself

the wild hurt
of my terrible soul,
& the wrecked self
I gave so many others,

for when I said
"I love you,"
I always meant
something else entirely.

I started thinking back on you
as early as college,
glassy well of gin
weeping for me in my hand.

Years after that,
my brakeless bicycle
invited me into a bath of sun
& you were waiting there

as a thought.
I remember
being so divided by you.
My longings

were only ever half
about the blue
of your eye,
& that blonde C

I turned it back so I could
touch you by the ear -
a gesture you always allowed.
Mercy? Desire?

I never knew.
The other half was new,
a movement inside me,
learning how

to be in love,
a fourteen-year-old's
grand, hopeless romance.
I was reminded of this

that July 4th a decade ago
when I saw you here
in my city,
with your husband.

You still held
skeleton keys
that opened
my older locks.

Your intelligence
canted over me
& erased
almost fifteen years

& my chest was smoke
& my skin was a sky
& just as before, half was love
& half was not.

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.

In the dream
I'm a child
in a car
waiting for
someone to
come back.

I wait for
some time.
I climb the
seats, feel
the leather
between my
fingers,
roll down
the windows,
play with
the orange
float of the
cigarette
lighter.

But no one
comes. I realize
that it's raining
leaves and bits
of brick.
The world is
bottomlessly
vacant. I'm not
even sure who
I'm waiting for.
I curl up into my
favorite jacket.

I know it's about
abandonment.
My veins fill with
ampersands,
my eyes with
the ace of clubs.
I can feel my
breath blowing out
like a chandelier
of pain for just
a moment.

Then I pull it
together under
the dangling
jellyfish of stars,
to see what else
sleep has up
its sleeve.

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.

Detroit dropped away
after the big band wedding,
where The Sheik of Araby
climbed the hot pine hall
& the two of us killed
a bottle of Laphroaig
that we bought by the church
from the bulletproof glass man.

The next day,
she got the call -
he had died
in her room.
The marriage
began to sag
at that exact moment -
something failed,
something failed,
something closed
that never reopened.
I was alone
breathing
her desperate air,
her secrets almost
off the tongue,
almost vulnerable,
but left unshared,
carried alone,
held away from me -
I found it out the hard way.

I still feel it,
the green empire
of the reception night
punctuated by her
lipsticked cigarettes,
& the trumpets calling
both of us back inside
for last call.

Little nooses of rain extend downward
in black runnels from the char-cheeks
of death's head pillows that scrape
off the humid rust from a mid-afternoon.
Throw open the windows, let the dark
steam that climbs from the lawn clippings
approach the nose like an awkward dog,
until it clings in the back of the throat,
to be washed down with raw scotch.

The rough breeze dies in the shaking green
berries that dot the holly dome,
the rain stops in the street, chastened,
& fat clouds grease on westward;
she's not here and she won't be again -
her cast-offs lie in shallow oubliettes,
in shadow-bottoms of torn paper boxes -
but this new-shirt weather speaks her name
in the Braille-pecks of new, blue sky.

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.

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.

Six of us here
in the bland and zinc-white
waiting room, small
machine on the floor
burning the air
with brown noise.
We're nominally here
for group therapy,
but in truth we prefer
to ritually founder
in great excesses of civility.

The therapists all but plead
for us to say right upfront
exactly what we don't like
about each other.
That's uncomfortable,
and each of us toys with the idea
before securing the old masks.

My own mask isn't the Venetian
kind, or the grotesque
Twilight Zone voodoo variety,
but the clear hospital type,
used to inhale great lungs of ether.

Sometimes sincerity creeps
from the gaps,
sometimes I do my best
to collapse into this checkered chair,
close my eyes and hide
in the sound of my blood.
It sounds surprisingly like
the brown noise machine.

I'm up against it.
I'm not getting younger,
and these feel like last chances
to learn to be, in a way
where I don't end up
shut away, eating myself alive,
riddled with depression
and loneliness and long black
strings of guilt that resonate
like a tritoning cello.

The thought carries:
The six of us
are an atonal sextet
of numbness and refusal,
dread, attraction, the works.
Around us, the whole room
is phthalocyanine green,
blue shade.
Therapist's preference,
probably calming,
soft music in the eye,
and it almost works.

But instead I am lost
in new haircuts,
in leggings ripped
behind the knee,
in the way a lamp
hunches over like an ibis.

Anything to avoid it,
anything not to admit it,
admit that despite years of this,
years of looking out
the high window into
the red riot of Farragut Square,
years of forcing myself
to say terrible
and incriminating things
while rain and snow
attacked the window,
I am still sick with feelings
where I must belong to someone,
must be deeply known,
or else I've never been
anything at all.

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.

This murmur of moth wings,
this secret bed-shadow,
this slouching perfume of rain -
I am haunted.

I suffer these night-knots,
these irradiated musings
on your slow return,
these poems that face the corner.

Haunted men love strangely,
with hearts full of runaway horses,
hands full of cloud and sand,
and lips that repeat fugitive names.

You were
long asleep
when I was
walking into
the beer garden.

I drank long
and deep
from a plastic
cup. The highest
alcohol content
I could find.
My blood was
a choir -
hallelujah.

I thought
of you
constantly.
My blood was
a mountain.
My blood was
a red crescent,
a ruby falling.

You sober up
with a mix of
alkaseltzer
& bread.
I don't make
any efforts,
letting the
blood drift
away on its
own accord.

I'm on your
page. Fifteen
year plans
& we want
the same
things. My
blood is
singing to
you, aria
after aria.

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.

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.

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.

"All fleshe is grasse" -
In danger of the mow,
we go to bed,
fight with touch
the shortness of life.
Death’s repeal is ***.

The rain plows leftover vapor
off the street, and into
the fawned sugar yard;
it's almost spring, and your birthday
is around every corner.
For me, nothing can dull it,
not even this smother of sun
screaming into the blanket,
or chilly gods that straddle
the graves of the air -
winter holdovers.
We are paused.
This gives me down
a jag of ****** noses,
& stain to salt my eye...
but I still adore your new nails
that pop scarlet,
your cloud of hair,
your count-coffee thoughts.
I hope you don't mind
that I can't always speak
without this heart-warble,
& that New York
doesn't wait for us,
not this year.

Things between us
have reached such a low
that I'm drunk at noon
on a Wednesday in October.

But what if I grabbed the sun
for you, shaking it free
from lacy palms of cloud,
and gave it to your greennesss?

Would it be enough to fix it?
Or are all these drams
of Scotch just turning out
dreams in the early afternoon?

The heart is a grave,
logic is buried there.

City of stones and gamblers,
trees leafed with playing cards,

old men skimming coins
from the fountain floor.

Here in Alphaville,
romance is the gun -

pull the hat down low,
rub your lips with your thumb,

drive in the neon-beaded night
to the swimming pool gallows

where you broadcast a red truth
before the wet knives come flashing.

The heart is a grave,
logic is buried there.

"What's your greatest ambition?"
"To become immortal, and then die."
-Jean-Luc Godard in Truffaut's Breathless


O immortal reader:
join me now (in a pine grove)

where in last night's dream
I attended my own funeral.

Oh no, it's not so morbid
(think of Tom Sawyer).

Besides, at 4:30 (not even dawn),
cats woke me in the half light

before the thing in the grave pit
began stirring and branching

(upwards? downwards?).
Instead I heard the speeches,

(tremulous and sentimental).
I saw the old pictures pinned

to the poster (I looked decent).
No one would talk about how,

how it happened,
but everyone said "I never

thought it would be like this."
(What does that mean?)

And, most mysterious of all,
"At least he achieved his ambition."

When I woke (born to shadow),
I had no idea what that might be,

but pennants of dawn are flying
over a moon drowning in a coffee cup.

There
is a
rain here
that
hangs
like
threadbare
silk
from the
cloud,
never
falling.

Birds
chop the
morning
with
their
small
flight.

They
gather
on the
church
before
shattering
the quiet
with a
clatter
of wing.

I stitch
these
things
I see
to mend
you.

This
morning
you
sent
me Yeats
so I
send him
back:

"So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest."

Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.
-All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare

Another well-burnt dusk,
clouds clawing up and out,
denying the gray night-grave.

The evening is so fast:
raw-mooned, silvery-blooded;
our hearts are lesser-than.

Thoughts in a jar, prepared
for the thinnest journey:
O, the memory carousel...

No: Stop the grief, cork it up.
Throw the midnight away.
The gun is empty,

click click click.
The roulette wheel churns
towards the cold morning.

Careful, reader: look how
the black garden blooms -
shhhh - take a sip... forget them.

You came
from verdant Dublin
by word and by mouth.

Ancient sorceries
dealt the evenings
like playing cards.

Paintings stammered
strange truths from the walls
of the marbled gallery:

Yes: you travel with and without.
So walk slowly, dear,
in the cold rain of May.

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.

Anger soaks the room abruptly,
I'm thinking of you.
Cleaning out my black bag
I find my tarot deck, waiting
in its green tin tomb.
I shuffle and deal across
the face of one of the paintings
I've been working on,
a red face scratched out.

The brown lid of night
hinges closed hard,
and lamps take up the slack
with yellow spittings.
I draw the Tower,
the Ten of Swords,
the Hermit.
Past, present, future tenses,
all corrupted.

But who's surprised?
I derailed it all myself.
Only the cat,
the palette knife,
and the lonely guitar
bring life to days
made thin with the grim
solipsism of therapy,
intolerable solitude,
and the conviction
that I am unsuited
for all of it anyway.

Of course, sometimes
the depression rots away
back into the sickly loam
where it first bloomed.
It's replaced by the mocking
low-key mania that howls
half-hopes, that each throb
like a throated singing bowl
combined with the profane
drone of an air conditioner.

In those moments,
things get done.
Bills get paid.
I reach out to other people,
breach the indifferent yawn
I feel between each of us.
I splurge, scrape a stool
up to a bar, borrow
an acquaintance for an hour,
or else drink hard liquor alone
until my teeth sing and drown.

Ange rebelle
voyageur, nomade
le sucre dans vie:
pour vous, je fabrique des lustres -
j'écris des centaines de poèmes
qui éclaire l'été en noir.
Je regarde tes peintures
et je rends grâce aux esprits vaudous.
La rue pleure la nuit sans toi.
Le ciel va dans un sens.
La rivière l'autre.
Ange Nomade,
mon coeur va dans tes mains
si proprement.

"Rebel angel,
traveller, nomad,
the sugar in life:
for you I make chandeliers -
I write hundreds of poems
that illuminate the summer in black.
I gaze at your paintings
and give thanks to voodoo spirits.
The street cries at night without you.
The sky runs one way.
The river the other.
Nomad angel,
my heart fits inside your hands
so neatly."

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