Easing into leaf:
Chrysanthemums opening,
Each one just for you.

Dublin
girl,
laugh
with me
into the
exploding
green
of trees
coming
into leaf
in this
fast angle
of city,
while
I ****
an hour
on this
bench full
of speech,
watching
night low
into lilac.

I talk to myself
as the night arrives
in little caskets
slipping over
yellow rooftops.
Winter slithers
& rattles back
under the doors,
while spring slews in
on orange cloud.
I say your name
& a luster throbs
across the walls.
Late hours are
breach born,
full of bent bays
of lamp light,
I plead into the ceiling
until I fill
with sharp shapes
draped raw,
& my little speeches
perish in gloves of air.
Out of the window,
black ribbons streak
the riverbank face
to the moon etchings.
High tides blot me:
I still feel as I did
when I met you.
You're a heart shaker,
you wrest the lid
from the world,
your joy fills
my naked mouth.
But something
has gone wrong,
hasn't it?
Disordered,
melancholy -
you, too, see
the night-caskets,
don't you?  
Dublin facades
vanish beneath
rain scissor arms.
But it needn't be so -
come and lean on me.
I will remind you
that spring is come
with green armies
of blithe devotion,
trees flick
with leaf,
& you are loved.
I know you don't even
like me to call you babe,
not anymore, but
I'll live with that -
I'll tell the floorboards,
the starlings and magpies,
the unsealed horizontals
that report at dawn:
it will be alright,
it will be alright.

I am wayward,
have always been.
Yet I'm one sleep
away from you,

& I'm still:
still as the night leaf,
still as the larch post.
still as the new moon.

Here is the pool
of evening,
come to take this
waiting from me.

I am wayward,
have always been -
but for you, lovely one,
I am patient as saints.

You haven't moved
in several minutes,
a perfect model,
as if it were your goal.
The sun filters through
gauze and lace,
the peculiar mid-morning
light that muscles its way
across the wall
in grasping splashes.
Your tea is steaming
in its high-waisted glass,
& I hear half-sounds
escaping from your room.
I am the reporter
of your brown eye,
writing this moment
to you even though
it's already gone.

For years I swam
with pockets full
of stones. The cold
water rushed to
accept me. At
the bottom was
another night
& I lived there
for far too long,
pockets sewn shut,
& my lungs wings
of blackest mud.

I broke free, and
drifted up to
the veins of stars
wavering on
the water's skin.
I took the air
& ate it whole.
Poems dropped from
my brown eyes, I
found you, I was
ready. Dreams lay
below spruces,
with coins of sun
we bought tickets
to history.

But will I hear
those stones again?
Singing from the
false night of the
drowning floor? It
keeps me awake
in the lean hours.

I'm just sitting here,
thoughts sieving through the pane
in little tarry slices, sluicing slurs
or slurries against a night
of Georgian house-faces crowding
their brick-point cheeks
eastward towards a flat disc
of frost, cut with black wings.

The storm glass has birthed
a wicked ammonia flake
from the quartzy ethanol thigh,
which I guess means rain
will break in soon to blotch
& pock the walk, breeding
petrichor into the wine-dark
water-heart of sinking air.

I make rough gestures
towards civility and society,
keep the words floating above
the sutured margins of the wound;
wouldn't want to alarm anybody.
There is no rescuing sleep tonight,
only this scrying glass clotting up
with starburst funeral wreathes.

Wednesday night drunk,
the sun lays so still
in its gray sarcophagus;
the sandy mid-rise
across the way
spits yellow blandings
into dead clouds;
the Aberlour bottle
raking its way
towards recycling.

O, that casual dismissal,
how it decimates -
"Thanks, Ev. You too."
But what do I know
of the little surgeries
of her evening?  
More whisky spills -
the sun's canopic heart?
I drank it,
it's gone.

I have stopped leaving this room
except for exigencies. Why bother?

Deadened clouds skate on the face
of the black rectangle every night

no matter what moves I make,
& somewhere up and out there

is a numb and strangely ovular moon.
It's all very far from me;

I wash my hands of all of it.
I watch the strange geometries

of strangers sitting tipsily
along the hypotenuse of Columbia Street,

laughing and singing happy birthday to Joan.
Joan is wearing yellow. While they all sing,

she gazes into the lush sinew of the trees.
A thousand years ago...

this street was just a brackish pool.
A thousand years from now,

serpents will bathe on the brick wreck.
But tonight... Joan and her circle

sag and slink into lavender flatness.
Soon they are specks, and then nothing at all.

"Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense."
-John Ashbery, Some Trees


After two tiring marriages,
& the women before and between,
she was olly olly oxen free:
come out don't hide it's safe.

Let me backtrack - I was four
& dad left, not too far, but...
far enough. I became, inside,
a two-headed monster of desire:

one me says go find love
grab it hold tight tight tighter;
a second me says wait watch be safe
they're already half out the door.

Feeling free, I gave too much,
or maybe needed same. Or both.
She left, and I was so haunted
I sold my house.

So now I just walk about,
**** an envious ear
at the young and ******
laughing into cut-glass nights.

I scry my sliding self in plate glass
reflections, surrounded by angels
on the hunt, letting the days
engrave their aches all across me.

The two-headed thing I was
is starved lean, fed only on sleep.
What now? This evening
the stars look laminated,

& streetlights hum and mumble
wolfishly over black triangles
of sweetened space where thoughts
hang like last year's ornaments.

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.

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.

A blitz of hairy sun
broke the neighbor's
camel-breaded lip
& thumbed its way
into bed with me.
The new couch
was shining
like silver bread,
& the cat stalked coinage
across the wainscot face.
Pulling myself
from Saturday's tomb,
I mutinied against
this frenzied easting,
befriending a bottle
whose contents
was gauze for the heart -
even at 7,
I can only think of you.

Swan swing or harp bridge,
by sunrise's purple finger
inside the azure waist.

City wakes broadcasting
red trees, shining pyramids,
vivid blossoms and vines.

The river's garbled mirror
under paint-crane chaperone
soon shows cerulean Christmas.

By the time hips of light
coalesce in the near-dawn,
you're gone - long since home.

i.
Sew the sun
into you.
Let them
all complain
about your
radiance.

ii.
The sun
replaces
your heart.
Let them
try to break
it now.

iii.
The sun
is plural,
doubled
in your eyes.
Let them
worry about
the yellows.

iv.
Chew the sun
in the evening.
Let them
moan about
the bite marks.

v.
Fold the sun
into your poems
like a blind seed.
Let them
grow anxious
as the words come.

vi.
The sun shines
on the Seven
Hour City.
Let them
find it,
if they can.

vii.
Rescue the sun
from the brown
shackles of
cloud.
Let them
shield their
rain-dimmed
eyes in
surprise.

viii.
Hide the
sun in
a dune.
Let them
discover
night.

xi.
The family
of the sun
comes to
visit you.
Spread
the table
wide.
Let them
all peek
through
the windows.

x.
You
& and
the sun
strut in
the sky.
Let them
watch and
cry about
the arrogance.

Bad luck
to dream
of the living.

Air is gaunt
with memory -
& what might be
across the line?

Moon has died,
stuck there like
a split opal
or cream iris.

Mind is filled
with omens
& char marks
of worry.

To dream
of the living -
night-killer.

Wild and kind, sweet-eyed,
you opened the drawer

& chose the long knife,
the anesthetic. Your hand,

it's so steady in the slicing,
unbothered by the steaming rib

or the hot pulp heart.
You've done this before,

you don't even leave a scar:
so careful, so careful.

Though you could if you wanted.
Yes, that's an invitation,

if you weren't sure:
cut this deep milk skin

& find my ruinous ache,
exchange it for your name.

Your smile is sharp enough,
your fingers are experienced.

You in that paper dress...
Ah - it's too late -

the theater is going dark.
The elms are sick with shadow.

The thigh of sleep
is whispering to you:

Go now, little surgeon:
you're done this delving.

Intent is always blotted
by leaking speech:

words stray from their purpose
like star-bellied clouds

that stumble and fall
into a coffee cup,

burning with morning:
a wet mirror face.

The gutters murmur
with yellow leaf heads,

a branch escapes
from the wood (unwillingly?)

& the morning vaults
over the white creek.

I'm here, I'm here,
the rain is saying -

it stalks me home
after the concert.

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.

I was once told that I wasn't
afraid of heights, but of being
thrown from them -
& this was a comfort, for
the flaw wasn't in me, per se,
but in my reading of other
people, my trust in their
intentions. Even so, crossing
any bridge was breathing knives.

Then I met you, and we walked
over Taft bridge, the largest
unreinforced concrete structure
in the world, rising above
Rock Creek gorge, 128 feet
above the bright green floor
I feared until you.

We crossed it in style. I was
in the angle of the eagle.
I walked on the backs of lions.
I held light. My eye surveyed
the depths of the glen.
I walked with you by my side
all the way to Dupont,
& when we shared coffee -
I spoke endlessly to comfort
your excess of sun -
I felt a swerve of glory, a sense
of the world that I only shared
with you.

I was once
told that I
wasn't afraid
of heights,
but of being
thrown from
them -
& this was
a comfort,
for the flaw
wasn't in me,
per se, but in
my reading
of other people,
my trust in
their intentions.
Even so, any
bridge was
breathing
knives.

Then I met
you, and we
walked over
Taft bridge,
the largest
unreinforced
concrete
structure in
the world,
rising above
Rock Creek
gorge, 128 feet
above the
bright green
floor I feared
until you.

We crossed it
in style. I was
in the angle
of the eagle.
I walked on
the backs of
lions. I held
light. My eye
surveyed the
depths of the
glen. I walked
with you by
my side all
the way to
Dupont,
& when we
shared coffee -
I spoke endlessly
to comfort your
excess of sun -
I felt a swerve
of glory, a sense
of the world
that I only
shared with you.

The
past -
the five
of swords.

"Destruction,
reversal,
infamy,
loss."

I pulled
at the
stars
for
years.
I left
rooms
with
my hand
over
my face.
I counted
clotted
clouds
& wondered
which
was mine -
but none
were.

The
present -
the wheel
of fortune.

"Destiny,
fortune,
success,
felicity."

We are
parted
only
by
miles
coated
with
sea.
In every
other
way we
belong
to each
other.

The
future -
nine of
pentacles.

"Success,
safety,
accomplishment,
discernment."

I­n small
weeks
you
will be
here

& the
Italian
woman
on the
card

with her
hooded
hawk,

vineyard
pregnant
with
topaz,

& gown
of roses

will
close this
prophecy
with
a smile
& a sigh.

Crinkles of steam
unfold from my golden coffee
into pyramids of air.

Just beyond, the television
radiates in rectangles
of submission.

3000 miles away, you sit
in your pajamas, watching
with me, linked.

Everything is sending signals,
if you know how to look.

We look for solutions to this problem...
in the cloud rush, in the oven gas.

I found a medicine that I drink,
it clears the night wreathes away.

Duran Duran's "The Chauffeur" plays
while the rain stomps in the black road.

That was us.... we were then,
among the cobbles and tombs,

hand in hand, absinthe and sugar
searing the air. We were; we were.

You held my thigh at night,
a bone against the insomnia.

The dark didn't come until later;
it had such a broad wing.

The hours grew late. The purple vine
clawed upward. The walls crawled with taste...

I lost my hold on things. Do you remember
how we watched the old Dean Martin

movie on TV in Rome? I drank beer
from a can while you laughed.

You laughed - it was the sweet middle
that sustained the world.

Now... now... the hour is long in the tooth.
My chest is a grave. There is nothing after this.

No, nothing - I'm sorry.
Dig this earth for no purpose, friend...

My ash collects around the fingertips,
waiting for the grand canal.

"Ghost cries out to ghost -
but who's afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
that start from my own feet."
-Theodore Roethke

It's true that each dark step
in the night-heavy hall
is given to the grave
in the air.  

But never, never accept
death's creaseless small,
cold palm. Be brave -
even a breath is a prayer.

Glossy-budded hair,
unnameably Portuguese,
your hand-picked star anise
floats in my pear sangria.

You are of the moment.
You are a smile and a nose ring.
You seem curious about me,
but you can't be.

Thank you for the swift nothings
of little talk that helped me along
on a Friday afternoon.
You couldn't know it,

but such small items
as bar talk have become, for me,
strange freedoms that bubble up
& sometimes displace the sorrow

that encases me perpetually
on these long spring days.
Your stance between the beer taps,
by the good scotch and gin...

it brings a faint gladness
to an ulcerated gray
that sweeps back westward
across the parapets of new night.

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?

The Lyft
driver
looked
almost
exactly like
Post Malone.

He talked
for a
while
until he
realized
I was
choking
up,
spending
my last
efforts
keeping it
together.

When he
pulled over
I lost it.

"Hey man
it's cool, are you
OK?

I've been
there
it's going to be
alright.

Girl?
Yeah.

Hey man,
cry it out,
gotta get it out.

I'll get you home."

Green-stroked leaf
over lapis door
with four panels -
black vinyl
perches shining,
a motorcycle,
a motorcycle.

It enters her eye,
the day's spillway
laid down
to beige page.
Color and form,
thrown from her hand,
thrown from her hand.

There is a cough and a bark
& then a roar, and suddenly
the green night is singing.

A light rain hangs like a history,
the silver toad bus squirms stop to stop,
the street racers flick rubber kisses.

In the opposite building, a woman
undresses before watching a movie:
the rain begins to flop and hook.

A bicyclist shines and streaks down
the sleekish funnel. The moon is forgetful.
A love story is playing out on the sidewalk.

The green night cascades smokes
with sharking clouds that drift north
into Maryland with their lethal line.

The cat sleeps on my great-aunt's rug:
I am alone in this quiet. Something is dying.
I watch the rain dry on the summer road.

Each pushing beat
is a kind of fall,
a low broken drum
in the hot dark hall
where the heart
is the size of a fist.

Red clouds skirt
over unlit streets
where the moon splits
like a rotten peach,
crowded in
a low black patch
of night-angles.

Again I'm in the same
unhappy plot,
dropping away from myself,
stiffening into one
whose mouth
is a voiceless half-slash
that a ***** fingernail
might etch
in a grit of clay.

Broken machine logic:
if alone, then woman.
If woman, then alone.
The tape is cut too close to the reel.
The night is too close,
& the reel is spinning:
watch the heart
in trembling skin.

Ghosts splash about
on the ice house wall,
beer chitters in the jar,
stories are told in fits and gnarls.

The moon is a bleached breast
in its brassiere of dappled smoke,
up above the cracked wet wire
in the driftwood garden curl.

In a slant, we all watch
a woman across the alley
in her blue dress, scanning
her hands for news of the heart.

In the near square, a thin man
is also a plume, standing shirtless
on his crystal wash of balcony.
The street sings: sea static.

All these people walk blithely by
as rain and steam take turns
on the roulette wheel.
I feel the weight of my interior,

I feel the limit of skin, the world
that ends there. I'm not sure
I belong here at the gathered table:
I'm a reflected photo negative.

Leaves spiral overhead
as the green-bedded steps
rise up in blotches to meet me.  
Loaves of clouds hunt and burst.

Whatever is behind me
presses me forward;
but whatever is ahead
pushes me back.

I often wonder
if maybe I am
the only man
in Washington
calling his lover
in Istanbul.

These poems shriek
through the air,
shaking the line,
coursing through
systems of white,
silent satellites,
breath in the valleys
of our hands.

So when I tell you
that I love you,
the words fill
all the spaces
of the world
before they are
presented to you
on your page
of glass.

I had a father
bandaged with
quiet. And so
I also tasted
that silent
gauze.

I had a mother
drunk with
self-regard,
stumbling feeling
to feeling.
& so I felt
everything
enormously.

It took so long
to find balance.
I carved a voice
from white marble.
I opened my hands
and let things
escape.

It's not about
the damage,
it's the long
walk back.

"I'm in love,"
so I shrink the world
down to a fatality,
something you could
wring out with *******.
The atlas makes scrape sounds
as Europe folds in half;
North America offers
nothing but slippery pulp.
This green touches that green -
if only distance were like this,
reduced like a wine sauce,
Washington sidling to Dublin
like old friends at the bar,
while collapsed Atlantic
makes a blue U shape,
bent.

I dive into your
burnt sugar eye
and bathe there
while the moon
stumbles to
fullness. Riots
of peaches joust
in the sunset
while sways of
black walnut
throw shadows
to the street.
Radio towers
blink away
in long ovals
of distance.
Lonely cars
drift as if on
the sea floor.
I share this
with you
while waxy
breezes trawl
across the face
of the new night.

There is a moon on my back
down the rising line of street.
A cold night-throb echoes.

I can't get a job to stick
and the web of days
is more gap than thread.

The gaps are quiet, though.
Fourth story wind carves through
the screen like an axe.

The Monday girl is gliding
under the brown ice clouds.
Things aren't very real anymore.

I walk in rooms of winter,
looking for a handhold.
I blame myself for this

depression, whose greasy claws
fill my mouth. Whole childhoods
of rain are slanting to snow.

The floor howled
in the last
lazy binge
of bronzy sun
before I broke free
to go running
the two miles
to the hospital
in Georgetown
where Dad was.

As I ran, I thought of
The Wreck
of the Old 97
which played on
the car radio
when Dad
drove us back
from the
Charles Town
racetrack
where I kept losing
the same $20
while Dad
placed exactas
and trifectas
to win
dinner money.

Turn it up
turn it up and listen
as the Old 97
engine over-coaled
and waving
with heat
races beyond rule
a bright streak
down the hill
down, always down.

The Icarus myth -
the father disappears
while the son melts
in the exploding face
of a memory.

The past is always
my witness -
the beach-eating;
the stumbles of love;
the small birds chopping
their wings through
the hysterical greenness
of her rain yard;
the late night snow walk
to her house on Otis,
full of first mistakes;
the blinding braid of ink;
the endless column of
the unsaid.

The same Madonnas,
the same pitying faces,
the same arched necks
of the same saints...

Clear it all
for a new palette.
Stone over pine blaze,
fringed gentian blot.
Broken-columned sun,
splayed in glade sand.
Drift water stroke.

Rescind
the School of Athens,
the Madonnas,
the arched necks.

What can they say
about lilies plunged
in the moon's syrup?

I watch the flash of their eyes,
the inhabitants of this mansion
who sometimes hear the rats
rushing downward in the walls.

Perhaps they pause for a moment.
Perhaps they have an upsetting second.
But they make their way back to the bar cart
& pour another grocery store *****.

Then there are those of us, my reader,
who step into the dark below the basement,
into the hewn room with the odd altar
covered in very old stains...

There are even those among us
who find the unfortunate stair
that leads down into the bleak bowels
where subconscious reigns,

where the sins of the father
are visited upon the children,
where faces are married to the pit,
where you can only stumble forward

until, at least, you reach the black lake.
Looking down, having eaten yourself
with a red smile and the knives of love,
you see your own face in the still water.

There is a line
from me to you.
It straddles
the salt **** of sea,
the starry marrow
of night air,
the pencil shavings
about your ankles.
It threads through
castles of romance
I built in another time,
the courtyard littered
with lost scarves.
The line spans
thousands of girdled
miles without effort,
yet it touches you
questioningly,
and lays down
like a stray cat.
Go ahead,
it's yours,
take it.

I was a knotted shadow,
walking under a bridge
in Dublin, brick water vault
under the grand canal line,
on my way to the coffee shop.

Now I'm a sun-ray, lost to scatter
on the bolt-broad walk,
lost in a carpet cloud,
lost, lost. I'm in another place,
where the wind off the river
tassles the tops of slate roofs
on its way to my corner windows,
a mocking push that carries no salt.

I am sure I will not see it again.
I will go out instead, forward,
out into the alleys and greeneries
& grassworks and cementings,
to find something new
that might replace a wet shadow
full of coffee by the sea.

She lives on the verge
of a wood where the shy deer stand in
raining glades, and sunken trees
unroll knotted shadows in the long
hour of the ******* sunset.

Her face is in my yearbook,
so serious, in the first row
of the literary club group picture.

I'm in the third row
looking stupidly away
from the camera,
missing the moment -
could that boy in the photo
call out over twenty years and say
"The fists of rain, the speckled deer,
the branching, shaded fog peeling
away as the dogs run in the morning -
these things are yours, yours, yours"?

There won't be children,
     let's be honest -
after all,
     you're not coming back.
  
You and I've become
     ninety degree angles
& the months
     go crawling.

I'll mail it all
     to Dublin.
No reason to scream -
     leave it in your cup.

It was a fair shot
     for a while,
but sometimes grass
     just dies in the yard.

The carousel
of your voice...
It lifts me all
the way home.

My hands ache
with emptiness,
they are so used
to holding yours.

I hear our music,
set to the drum
of the rain. These
are the lyrics.

I am forever
fifteen with you,
I am under a spell,
I use sails of night

to come reach you
in dreams. You are
a gift. For you,
I poach eggs.

In this odd world
of valentines and
pine cones, you
are the heart of me.

We are unfit
for these lives
as we lead them;
betrayed, moon-sick,
palmfuls of our pills
getting washed down
with the cheap wine
we hide under the sinks;
even the streets
are depressed
under the vinyl sun
with a lion's mane
of cloud, anxious
in the passing;
I don't know
what life I would shape
for you to make you happy,
but it wouldn't look
anything like this one.

These pieces move
through a morning ether
of pale string dawn:
knight of coffee,
bishop of grass,
rooks of blonde
bones sleeping
in the *****-thicket.

My heart eats a shock
after knitting careful
plans for weeks now.
The metro train
rattles and shines.
The sun hides
in castled cloud.
Everything feels
bigger than it is.

They ask so much
from me, I could
never give that much.
Still, the day is long.
The complacent heart
will learn and adjust.
I still cherish you
with all my psychology.

White noise is falling
from the treetops again.
I'm looking for a new apartment,
touring the giants
up and down 16th Street,
wondering if I'll cry here too
across the ancient parquet,
& who I'll bring home
to share coffee and deep jags
of insufficiency, feelings
I should not have shared.

Everything is eventually
unspoken, everything is.
Keep the heart off the sleeve
for a change. Hideaway
in the dull bronze candle
of winter city sunset,
gently tarnished with old snow.
Pause on the high Taft bridge,
despite the height,
and drop the heart away.

It's a lie,
I couldn't do it.
The heart sticks
in the hand.

The wind
finds a tongue
in the hazel
below the
flaking air.

At seventeen
I was in
a Pontiac
at two in
the morning
& I saw it
moving
in a coat
of leaves,
awake
& sentinel.

It uses
elms
to sigh
east
& chimes
pinned to
the brick
by an old
plum nail
drip sprinkles
of its music
into the
amber eve.

With
mouthless
whisper,
it tells me
that spring
is here and
the long
acres
between us
are just
the wild
playing fields
of fireflies.