The glass stands here
in the lee of the rattle;
the sun's yellow syrup erupts
into this bottle-breeze;
I will signal to you
in the ways you understand;
I will be your silver armor,
your lance and pennant.

You are Dublin, Istanbul,
you are Amsterdam, Paris, Rome,
you are New York, Washington,
you are Dublin again.

I'm trapped in Washington -
please save me.
Snuffs of ice winnow
towards me in the mornings.  

Return me to the strokes
of your bed, under the window
glutted with gulls, where the triptych
stakes soft pitches of rain.

Come and retrieve me
from these lidless clouds,
unending widow's eye,
che gelida manina.

Thaw, love,
& hold me there -
I am yours,
or don't you remember?

This poem will say nothing.
"Clouds snowed in the yard,"
and I record it here,
for reasons unknown even to myself.
The clouds have wine-dark pelts,
but that’s nothing new: skies are hard
to find new lines about. Poets fear
the cliché, try to enjamb around it – won’t help.
What is the jaggy cumulus mouthing
in the upper distance? Coagulating lard,
the snow meets salt, goes gray. Look up, peer
into that distance: skullish hills melt,
discolor into the hue of bruise or welt,
as if even the earth self-flagellates, regards
this day with self-loathing. I’ll change gears:
turned skyward like a telescope,
this poem said nothing.

Went to the
therapist drunk,
a blonde Wednesday
of rain corsets,
redding leaves,
cloud dough.
I remember the
syrupped anger,
distilled from
child's blood,
dripping on the
therapist's shoes.

Late afternoon
floating avenue,
apology of grass,
little pushes.
She was waiting
in the shaking
shadow.
This time
I had some kind
of self-regard.

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.

There will be a totem -
maybe castles are green
in gavottes of sun,
or a sly, sleek-angled bus
by a sky-headed smoker
will make its play.

Yes, we're in a play
about these totems,
where exiled smokers
in a delirious green
catch the last bus
to the sun.

But that diva sun
refuses to play,
& eats the bus.
Ain't that a totem?
We'll always be green,
always casual smokers,

(or is it social smokers?)
flicking ash at that sun,
which is evening green.
In the museum we'll play
among the totems,
catch a line of buses,

& then another bus,
almond exhaust smoke,
until we view the totem -
a saddle on the sun,
a silence in our play,
a voluptuous green.

The same green's
splashed on the bus.
Maybe the best play
for a casual smoker
is to eat the sun,
eat the totem,

then eat the green.
Take the express bus
to another play.

You're off the plane
back in Istanbul,
where your heart
was made. Now, at night,
it seems a little peculiar
this time.

But you've got all the time
in the world. The plane
is long gone for some peculiar
destination, while Istanbul
belongs only to you tonight,
you can explore its heart...

Yes, tell me all about that heart
and about all the times
you walked out into the night
and looked up at the trails of planes
flying far above the lights of Istanbul -
They must have said it was peculiar,

to want to leave on one. Or not peculiar,
maybe it felt natural, easy in the heart,
a readiness to leave old Istanbul
and embrace someplace else this time,
to climb aboard the waiting plane
and fly off into the night.

When you land, it's still night -
isn't that peculiar?
The plane disappears
and it's just you and your heart
this time.
Say goodbye to Istanbul -

So many places aren't Istanbul,
all of them under the night
of drowsy stars and slow time.
It's rather peculiar
how the heart
is faster than any plane.

But this time, love, you're in Istanbul.
I watched your plane cruise the night.
It's peculiar how my heart hurts.

Ancient rain still wreathes your hair, lingers,
unwilling to assume the mantle of air. I am flame,
I am July, ascending into strange worship.
Be careful even as you read this, your eye vulnerable
in the desert ruin of this page, each word entwined
with the quiet, holy book-scent.

N, was this an invitation to you? Bathed in the scent
of mint from soccer field gardens that lingers
despite twenty years of memorial rust, entwining
with your dark hair that flashes guttering flame.
Mint and hair our prophesy, but still vulnerable,
liable to dissolve. Let us by reading worship

the old poets; Lorca our hymnal. We’ll worship
as fervent heathens until no mint, no hair, no scent
of books can stop this ribbon river moment, invulnerable.
Old orbits decay invisibly but still we linger
in our mansions of hurt histories, cored by the flames.
I am reduced by degrees to a shadow, entwined

with a false animal made for the world, entwined
the way the barb is with the wire. Worship
is fading smoke crying nostalgically for flame,
is the intoxicating almond whose scent
bears the mystery of cyanide. Come, N, linger
in my world with me, so vain and vulnerable.

Savonarola burned away the vanities – wooden and vulnerable,
the crooked dice screamed. Playing cards entwined
with the illustrated pages of risqué books, a perverse worship,
a sacrifice that rose in pornographic ash and lingered
in the branches of midnight above charcoal Florence until the scent
collapsed soft as a sigh back into moraled flames.

N, perhaps you are the consuming flame
in this story. Am I your violin, varnish melting, vulnerable?
Or am I Savonarola, lighting the first match, the telltale scent
of match heads gambling in the breeze? We are entwined
in a new history. Come read with me. Worship
the blind hills of the sea. Their melancholy lingers.

She reads by candle
in the little kitchen
by the rain-licked window,
pushing against a dark
that's black as pepper,
black as the merlot bottle.

It's empty, the bottle,
neck used for candles.
As for the pepper,
it spread across the kitchen
in the quasi-dark,
when she opened the window.

No - that window
is a lie. So is the bottle,
& the rest. I tried the dark
against the candle,
in the mind's kitchen,
got stuck on pepper.

Let's try again: pepper
falls like snow in the dark
when I'm in the kitchen
making dinner, bottles
open for tasting, candles
lit against the coming dark...

Much better. Seal this dark,
speckled with salt and pepper,
with the soft wax of candles.
Open the window,
tilt the bottle,
dance in the kitchen,

the new kitchen -
feel the call of the dark -
drink from the same bottle,
Burgundy earthy as pepper,
close the windows
& touch me with the candle.

I drink from the bottle in the black kitchen,
ignoring the cold candle in the dark.
There's pepper blowing out the window.

In the deeps
of my night,
your sun opens.
The sight
of your words
sugars me.

When my own sun
achieves the tartness
of noon, you are
opening a book
beneath a
bismuth moon.

For you I still
a heartbeat, send
it on its way.
It will reach you
by morning.

I speak
& dice
roll on
my tongue.

I move
to kiss
you
& my
mouth
is filled
with
sevens,
sevens,
sevens.

My heart casts
a shadow
that takes
your form:
How can I
resist?

No phone call tonight.
The sick moon
coughs a cloud -
like a gray stain
on its face -
& I watch
as the new cloud
falls through the night
like a guillotine.

Sick moon,
thin and waxing,
my chest is
a curving hurt too.
Twisted and torqued
by the old carving forks
from the Thanksgivings
where red wine
sat screaming, and
polished plates
were also moons,
hard and silent
and empty.

No phone call now,
the breakup is done.
I shed my skin and salt it.

No phone call now,
only vagrant silence.
The sick moon breathes
a scrape of cloud
down the quiet
spine of night.

The worries
come on the walk
back, melting
together like ice
in the glass:
I'm missing
something,
& what pieces
remain
are broken,
& that I am
never in control
of it.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

No, you don't
see a thing,
I'm sealed,
a sarcophagus,
a remote satellite,
the flood
is put away
as neatly as
a magazine
on the newstand.

I make another
oath, to pry
open the tomb,
to speak with
a mouth
like a glen,
to accept
that I am not
my parents
nor the drift
of their silence.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

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.

In the emptiness of my
father's birthday the
year after he died

I'm picking up my girlfriend
at the airport, and July
is a singing bed of trees.

A giant shadow roams
through my mind. Birds
slash in a surging field.

How is he gone?
I feel things slide
away from me,

memorials in the air,
when I confront
the gear of absence.

I drink from his favorite
coffee cup - "Key West,
A New Slant on Life."

I invoke him in so
many ways but the
shadow still moves.

The sixth of July
arrives and departs
in nails of heat,

& new faces draw
the sting away
from missing ones.

Myrtle grows wild,
white moon bells,
blood blossoms -

I trap these things
inside his old
Nikomat camera

as the day arches
its back to let
the shadow by.

Spring is gin
weeping
in the hand,
Malbec against
the wrist,
the deep-drafted
light cresting
all their laughter.

It's hard to bear
when I'm over
here, in the other
hand of the night,
running beneath
the moon as it
wanes down
into the river,
as if trying
to push me
your way.

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.

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.

I.

Your fingers raking
through chestnut wreaths
gapped with gloss:
the wind mussed your hair

into a sudden wild shape,
& the canal was glowing
like a runaway filament
in the buttery dusk.

You had gone quiet inside,
months before.
You slipped a spider's lyric
under my tongue.

Summer was really winter,
& winter was a belt cinched
around a hopeful throat
crawling with clouds.

II.

I'm not good on my own.
I drink too much,
I have terrible dreams,
I don't move for hours, days.

Stars bleach me, pierce deep
into a plastic rib space.
Old friends get married,
get pregnant, go invisible.

I turn on the charm,
a smile pooling amid
the pink. Whisky
floating over two tongues...

Was I supposed to make a move?
I missed a cue, somewhere.
I feel my insides lurching
like sun-broken snow.

The fog loses purchase
on the window
and, dying, wicks
ashy vapor's slick scatter
to gated green-brown.
Morning comes again
in fractioned crooks
of snow declining
into fat eggs of rain.
The fog is a colossus,
ravels with dragging step,
before retiring itself
above oak branchlets.  
The sun wraps away
in gray, as if stolen.  
Nativity of cloud.
I'm telling you this:
everything is possible.

It's snowing
tonight,
and I think
******* Dad,
when Maryland
beats Indiana
and I move
to text him.

He's beyond
snow now.
So what do I do
with these
unbearable photos
he took of me
standing alone
in the withered sun
on monumental trains,
I was six or seven,
out by the
rusting roundhouse
in Brunswick?

It's been snowing
for hours
& I carve
a footpath
out to the
unplowed street
to watch the
shining gray
banks under
the amber light.

There is no
route to carve
through this silence.
My father
was built
from ghost towns,
from Manzanar,
from the endless
pine-dark
of Idaho's
rivered night,
from all the
unmapped places,
he grew complete
in himself.

And even now
as I watch
the snow slant
and stumble
I am left behind
as his son
apart from him
& without.

The snow dives
into the
night blankness
& I wonder
if I had died
first, cutting
short this reckless
careless crooked
sprawl, would he
be writing here?

The smeared
gray glow
of the screen
across his hands,
the fat flake
snow rising
like dough
beneath the windows?

The purple folding face drips
into the cake-colored battlement:
night is here again.
The sun has kneeled into the treeline,
into the gauze-clouds
whose humid cobalt heads
hang, hang, just hang
all angled like hammers
in a carpenter's belt.  

Everything seems to be ending:
cicadas have erupted
in tens and sevens
with bright scarlet eyes
to die on the sidewalks
in little hums and hisses,
looking at me through
whetted blades of lawn.

I'm moving soon, to the point
of the old triangle
where we haunted
the coffee and ice cream store,
where she stole a little shining spoon
that we used to mix the luminous milk
into the coffee pool.

How will it feel, after dark,
under unfamiliar high-stippled ceilings?
So quiet - she's gone -
her vacant clothes
no longer flutter in the closet
when the breeze slips through.

Will some rain come,
blue-brushed brow,
& wash this feeling away?
I feel the night moving,
crawling on insect feet -
the air is full of absences,
great holes that go unfilled.

The wind is settled in the east,
and the clouds are gathering
heavy hems.
I find a single dark hair of hers
on the inside of the pillow case,
years later,
years later.

The stars all come out at once,
like whipping a sheet off a bed.

A crowd of silver
floats in the moon's broth,

& approaching apples of light
break away from the black hoof,

the flooding vein,
ten thousand irises.

Wide dollars of summer thunder
brush the early night.
I've messaged you: no reply yet.

The cloud-curtain births
small violent flags of rain
that waver and fall limp
into the hot gray of the street.  

I'll have no part of it -
instead I'll work on my map
of your thoughts that I started
years ago, even before you knew.

(After Lorca)

In the cloudy evening,
I was a heart, a heart.

I was ripe with song
when I was breaking.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

In the sleepless morning,
I was still myself, a heart.

The evening was ripe
with my voice, a song.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

Thinking of you -
the night caress,
the black lip flower,
the water hall.

Sleep won't come -
only the quiet wait
until the soft white
hoof of morning.

But I'll mail these
little ponds of thought
to your bed, in case
it softens your eye.

The cat makes her bed
as constitutions of sleep
overcome her.
The day peels back
in pieces like an orange
revealing the sweet
flesh of sleep.
In the weave of day,
the cat finds a bed
in an old leather chair,
triples of sleep.

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

I stand here,
cut from flight,
shaped by love.
You hold branches
of mulled wine
by the black milk river.
The blue and gold
of your soul
nestles in the sleep
of my eye.

The lowest pine branch
bows its head just above  
where we buried our names
on that day in May.

The air was sweet
with anise, and the wind
through the pine boughs
sounded like the sea.

I want to dig up our names,
I want to push aside
the needled thigh of pine
& bite ***** into mulch.

I want to remember
that day in May
when we buried our histories
in a drum of gelato.

The sun sluices in -
the light just won't
stop breaking.
Birds are weeping
in trees full of dawn,
& poets run to the streets
to scribble out a heart.
The sun pulls away
from a neck of night.

I say your name
over and over,
spiced petals
of a sea rose.

The moon has already plunged
into the alley by my window,
& the stars are scraping away
with milky fingers.

It's a night for names.
I find them on green walls,
in cups of green wine,
across greenish clouds.

I say your name
over and over,
like collecting sea roses
with both hands.

I have seen strange things, Celalba:
clouds wrecking, runaway winds,
high towers bent to kiss their foundations,
the earth vomiting its very bowels;

hard bridges breaking like tender reeds,
prodigious streams, violent rivers,
waded poorly even with cleverness,
mountains poorly bridled;

the days of Noah, people high
in the tallest of the pines,
the most robust and skyward.

Shepherds, dogs, huts and cattle,
I saw floating, without form or life,
but I feared nothing but my misery.

My eye's choir
garbles the sway
swung from your sun's
dying orange angle.

Yes, Saturn's higher
on the belted tray
of stars, softly done:
we're entangled,

you and I.
If I'm a bird,
you're the wings,

though your thighs
eat all my words,
in their long dark strings.

I agree to reveal a secret
in a sonnet, Inez, my beautiful enemy;
but no matter how well I set it up,
it cannot be in the first quatrain.

Here, come to the second: I promise you
that the secret won't slip without my telling you;
but I'll be ******, Inez,
if eight lines of this sonnet haven't already gone.

See, Inez, how hard life is!
With the sonnet already in my mouth
and every last detail planned,

I counted each line and have found
that according to the rules by which a sonnet plays,
this sonnet, Inez, is already finished.

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.

White roses hook sleeves
in a hot rain park
as we hurry to leave
a new fringing dark
of clouded eaves.
I drink mezcal, you sip
soft wine, we kiss
at the bar as storms slip
through streeted air
with a springing hiss.
Lightning lashes bare
angles of pink night.
We lean close, share
Sunday's appetite.

I'm pulled down the boulevard,
the shining hide of the hired car
reflecting all the salted yellow blots
that fringe the crashing air.
Speckled city, I climbed her stair
when the night grew late and taut:
I embraced all the darkest angles
of her room, the candied tangles,
the breasted murmurs, the knot
made of half-started words,
until the mind got waxy, slurred
by louche, unchaperoned thoughts...
O car, this hour with desire's bruised -
if you take me back, I won't refuse.

I'll be your bard
and write to you -
love notes, true.
In the yard,
the cherry-starred
blossoms flew,
a kiss's queue,
The Lovers tarot card.
O my distant one,
come near -
I'll read you Donne,
hold you here
while the sun
appears then disappears.

The grass is sage and fawn
where the flaxen lipstick
ruckles through the brick
to neck the lawn:
I love you most.
Here by this chimney is a dried
crepuscule where the sun died,
as we made our champagne toast,
then took the southern stairs
to launch the ******* dark,
& leave kisses like postmarks
in little blooded pairs.
There is no second place
to your coup de grace.

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

A gray rain
is slinking down
the sunken crown
of alley lane.
Green-topped church,
I bid goodbye
to your broad thigh,
a mourning perch.
I'll miss the stone
that frames this view
of moon, a bitten scone
against night's broken brew -
you were a hardy bone
that braked my raving blues.

Swig and swim in dimming seethe,
plastic cup palomas, beers held
close to chest as voices lap
up steeply to black rafters.
Standing close, I feel you breathe
under my hands, and swell
with music, ribbon-wrapped
in clap and laugh.
These nights, they roll on in wild waves:
we're falling bed into bed,
our touch like breaking bread
before a feast where nothing's saved
for later - not a single bite...
Then day rises cold and wet and white.

Sunset sloe,
candle sway,
cloud slip.
Night wants,
hush wish,
wedding will.
Paint away,
bedding bow,
arching hip.
Steam haunt,
gin dish,
hazel trill.
Irish love,
endless dove.

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.

You were a smeary bruise,
your eye hysterical,
cut from white twill
in the brumal March;
I slipped my blues,
to a blonde chorale
in your room, on the hill
gushing with larch.
We practiced slow,
while black cones bled
coffee. Your breath
came in little throws,
your heart in parcels of red,
that led to our little death.

The birds are rioting - dispelled
in a shudder from the arm
of the fog-headed elm that splays
towards fresh pins of frost,
wind spoons them down to grass.
O little birds, I too am pulled -
a branching ardor folds and flays
my days to nights. Her easy charm
spills across me and I'm as lost
as the brittle leaf-eye that last
breaks from the tree into new winter...
The birds fork to ledge or hedge
as I walk on - my unruly center
tamed and shaped to urgent pledge.

Sons and
daughters
of my future
walk beside me -
simulacra in a
dreaming sun.

Please, tell me
their names.
Tell me if they
had my coffee
eyes. If they
had your
sweet voice.
Tell me what
you remember -
this reverie
is yours, too -

I fasten my
dreams to you
with the soft
strings of
my marrow.

Shavings of cloud
drop like cut hair
and brush my face.

Snow is plowed,
the street is flayed
and thrown with salt.

District sleet is like lace,
a wet veil, a noose,
more not there than there.

There's a grave in the air,
it's filled with my father.
My heart turns to water,

it just breaks loose -
it's nobody's fault.