I was born
in the hammer-house,
where the nurse
pulled me blue
into the panic.

In hospital halls
the needle crawls
all the way to maternity.
I laid alone in the crib
like a wet seed.

I was born
in the hammer-house,
where my name
was a black impression,
like a coffee-ring on a table.

It's a fundamental law:
all matter emits radiation
(all of us even you right now)

& the energy level depends
on the temperature of the object
(inversely related to intensity).

This is black body radiation.
Here, in our meager summer rooms,
we have long infrared auras

(only lizards see them);
our atoms are gracefully aching away,
smeary leaking daubs in halo.

The hotter something is
(like that fling of sun up there)
the more energy it heaves away.

That molten starry tussle
is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit
(& so we see it yellow-white) -

"But," you say, "what if something
is hotter than a star, what then?"
Something, you mean,

like the strange chemistry that burns
burns burns burns burns burns
in my brain on a Tuesday night

when remembering an autumn day
in a cemetery in Paris so many years back
(Chopin Morrison Abelard Heloise Wilde Piaf &c)

it was such a perfect day with her
(the synapses and relays are all
clicking clicking clicking clicking

with wild remembrance)...
Well, then (in theory)
I should be giving off ultraviolet light

at an almost infinite rate (wouldn't I?).
I don't know what it means
that I am here in the plush dark

quiet and quelled by thought
(except perhaps the catastrophic energy
is scrawling and etching me into oblivion).

Black crash
pillow's face,
twilled to
the old nightmare.

Ironic that
the child who
spent years
fighting
the father
who left,
the mother
who curled,
ended up
divorcing
year after year.

This night
shone with
shedded
skin. I
walked away.
The moon
was pregnant
with an
airless sea.

I woke from
all of this
feeling like
a wreck
that might
be saved
by you,

but the miles
between us
argue so
persuasively.

Black Madonna,
gazing from a
golden cage,
the iron-headed night
is heavy with song.
Lifted sleeper
in a shining field,
is your vague
gesture something
like forgiveness?

Drag black stroke
all the way down
in the early hour.

Winter sun rises
late: I'm awake
in this crackling dark,

out on a walk
& starting my day
with the incandescence

of Xmas trees spied
in the windows
of strangers.

Alone
In black park of bed
-Elise Nada Cowen


Bedding them, saving them -
(or maybe the reverse?)
it was all the same to me.

All of them, like that;
One liked to wrestle first,
another wanted to be tied down.

Their eyes loosed in the darkness,
swimming at me, sparking
& begging, always begging.

But all of our skins need touching,
all of our faces want remembering.
So I gave them what they needed:

I loved them all with unclouded heart.
Ivy trellises inside me,
but memory is still sterling.

Black park of bed -
yellow crush dawn -
I am the giving snare.

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.

In the bathroom at work
cheap dime-store razor
blunt as a wood-axe
plowing my beard
of coarse Sicilian hair,
a surprising amount gray.

Men from other offices
wandering through, eyes
that click judgment
while they wring their paws
under a tepid sink:
well, *******, I think,
who's holding the razor?

Maybe they object
to the blood that spots
the buff-colored basin,
though I'm careful
to push it down the drain,
streaking the porcelain
like a peppermint candy.

Captive of the mirror,
prisoner of myself,
radiant with anger,
razor in my pocket,
blood on my face.

Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.

The
night
is so
painfully
blue
that
my
chest
becomes
a cave
of melody.

Cars
exchange
blue
places
like chess
pieces
castling.

The moon
hears the
blue
dreams
of you
that
string
from my
fingers,
& bursts
with
desire.

I watch
planes
crisscross
the tube
of indigo,
but I
don't
care -

you aren't
on one
of them,
yet.

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.

Blue sword of night,
red sword of morning,
yellow sword of afternoon.

The depressed machine
is full of sharp parts.
Who turned it on?
It's a trick question:
it was always on.

But it never rains
on the whole country
at once. Some glade
somewhere is shining -
beats of grass under
knots of sun.

My crest is laden
with mournful anchors:
each high is waited on,
politely, by a low.
Can you free me?
That, too, is a trick question.

Blue sword of night,
red sword of morning,
yellow sword of afternoon.

Salt pulpit,
streeted sand,
brass and tar,
bell broken
by the new wave.
Evening splinter
stuck in riprap,
memory hurled
into sharp relief.
Pilings grow,
dead teeth
from rushing
gum of surf.
Night's tide
parks on
blue sand,
dies as foam.
Boardwalk
lights never
seem to waver.

My body was against me
even at birth,
trying to strangle me
with my own
umbilical cord.

It kept pulling away.

Sometimes it loaned
itself to a lover,
no matter
my ambivalence.
Or refused itself
to one
I desperately desired.

Sometimes it added
to itself in greed,
and then shed it,
in grief.

I understand
a little more
why my father
filled a coffee mug
with bourbon
every early morning
I spent with him.

The body is quiet
when alcohol speaks.

Sleep circles
with wide wings.
Pages vanish down the eye's well:

Napoleon burns Moscow,
French detectives fry onions,
Lorca dies in the greenest green.

Rain spits into the room
crooked, dark. I'm alone.
The gyre closes, soft as a net.

Dreams hunch on the furniture.
The mirrors broadcast
the Venetian blinds croaking

and rattling against the screen
like creamy swords
in enamel scabbards.

Book-addled eyelids
are rusting into blinks
of burling dusk.

Each dying thought
is a sleek Deco Bugatti
lead by a shining path

from teardrop headlamps
whose fingers pry the night
moments before tires

sing rubber to blue.
The rain gathers into serpents
in the channels of the floor.

Above you hangs
the fat black branch
of sleep's truest face.

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.

In for a penny, in for a pound,
just throw the cork away:

the glass is filled until we're drowned.
With murmur and rumor we pray,

dreams mantling like thorn-crowns.
How much could two souls weigh...?

More than a feather. Well, together we're bound,
& together we'll stay.

Who'll buy the next round?
Pint-hands are cold and mottled as clay,

their faces spinning lost and found:
can't win if we don't play.

When the hour comes round,
there's a bill to be paid

before sleep seeps from the ground
like steam... No, lover, this way -

come sever the spine of the town
with me, two fraying strays

riding each other all the way down,
eyes flat and cold as old ashtrays.

Exit Tchaikovsky into the smoking mirror,
humid masks of the night servants
stalking down the water-walk.

Ash falls from a high tongue
all across the face of the moon embassy
like a bony comb through snow's hair.

Fade to brass: the cars sneer across the street,
interrupting blonde melodies held rapt
in plastic by cigarette Rapunzels.

I sit by the flower dress.
Bare legs slip across the old eye trellis
that masses by the death-green park,

muffling the memories that break free
from the black seance. I'm a braid of regret.
A bird is dead on the cement.

Brandy in my blood,
thoughts riding across
the pink plain of my hand.
M Street confessions
come cheap this time
of year, when
cherry flowers tint
the air with their
exploding heads.

Her version of me
seems better than mine -
I'm always out in the distance
selling rain back to the clouds.
Spring's coarse branch
clubs the brownness
of my unspooling eye.

Is she second-guessing?
Who can blame her?
I have burned all
my wild dreams
into flakes and cinders.
My art is hungry,
a nest of grinding teeth.

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

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

There is a
bent blue hill,
a green pool,
a bleached heart.

Remember when
we saw Lucy,
in the checkered
room, that drowsy
drunk woman
leaning against
my back, singing
every word?

There is a
red elm blaze,
a white tooth,
a bleached heart.

Can't you feel
I'm trying to say it?
Look, I know
words are not
my bridges.
I feel them perish
between us.
Can't you see it
on my face?

There is a
gray brick crumble,
a yellow deadlight,
a bleached heart.

Come see the dead clocks,
between the blocks of sickness
& the giant silent ****.
You must remember
what you gave me,
that last coarse night
when we were so hungry -
bring it with you,
even if it's raining.

I hold no high grievance
in my heart this morning:

not for the ex-wife combing
smoke signals from an outer reef

not for the crass jackhammer
breaking the city's black bones,

not for the fresh pink sky
that won't turn blue for me,

not for the dying elm leaf
that fell across my feet as I walked

over chilled rye grass, breaking
the breeze in two with my chest.

The leaf drifts
to a green grave.

The soft run of sun
spreads red in the hand.

Angles descend
white into bronze.

Where are you?
You break my symmetry.

All these engravings
in a wing-wax afternoon

are hollow
in your persistent absence.

The garden is filled with gods
and beggars and dull, fat cubes
that gather rain.
A bronzed angelic family nods,
weighted neck-joints, tubes
of browning flames.
Arrested drama, perpetual frown,
wrestlers mid-lock,
eyes into the sky.
I can relate, my luck's down,
girlfriend's gone, I'm stuck
to my skin, lonely.
Easy to imagine the appeal
of the museum garden life,
to be appreciated and secure,
with a fat cube friend's repeal
of flat love, a new bronze knife
to cut into the meat, to cure.

My heart is muffled,
buried as if in sea mud
alongside thorned shells
nestled in the slick.

Purple gore rings it
in ribs like tented fingers
as it sits and waits
for nothing in particular.

By drunken prophesies,
libels and dreams,
it makes its needs known.
Like small birds on the wing

spreading wind-wetted seeds
into the endorsing green,
I half-hope that something grows
from this busily clouded chance-chain.

Maybe a small gesture,
made half-way, made in jest maybe,
might root in the red of the soul,
unmuffle the muscle's knell -

but it all passes by -
no one is waving this way.
The floor is an emptying pattern;
the rain is coming, the rain is coming.

Alone in a folding
wing of sun again,
where Scotch passes lips
straight to an idling blood.
If you worried, don't -
I ate another day without you.

Burnt sugar spangles
checker a green wall
the morning I'm on
an emergency call
with my former therapist,
who calls you my
major adult relationship,
& she is right.
Of course it hurts,
to lose that.
There's her, and then
there's everyone else,
& it doesn't feel close,
does it?
We're in a strange place.
I'd give anything I own
to board the next flight
from Dulles to Dublin
& nestle into the crook
of your arm over coffee
& almonds.
You put everything
you had into this one...
Instead I'm selling
this condo so full of you
that I can scarcely breathe,
moving back downtown
where the whitish blots
dip back and forth,
& waiting, waiting,
for something to change,
You just have to be patient
until she is ready
for one thing or the other.
& then it's noon,
& the call is over,
& the bobbin of sun
riffles back its little coins.
One thing, or the other.
Or the other.

Call me yours
in this country
of dusk.

Call me yours
in the blotted lilac,
in the acrylic
evening, in the
time-plagued
water mirror.

You know that
I will kiss you
& break the
honeycombs,
raise the sheets
as midnight sails
while rectangles
dismount in the
orange and
a gibbous moon
dwells in the
nettles of new
constellations.

Call me yours
in the earliest
hours when
the forgotten
fireworks drip ash
like broken snow.

Call me yours
when the whales
of morning begin
to stitch their
broadside song,
each to each,
& you raise a
tent of light
with your smile.

You know that
I will kiss you
among the
almonds of smoke,
the yellowed books,
the soft repairs of
yesterday.

Call me yours:
I know it already
but the sound
is a high garden
ploughed with sugar.

Fleeing line cross-wave,
lateen sail's white-flash,
buckling up the race-wind:
caravel out on the blue-green,
making every speed-point
under the gray coast-cloud -

You,
     on your way to me.

I see what I am
& what I was
in the surging hazel
mirror of your eye.

The dragon looks
into the froth
of the waterfall
& remembers
the carp that
spent a hundred
years leaping.

Soon, the bars will all close.
Soon, the restaurants will empty.

Yet this wild archery lawn,
these elephant bones,

this wild strawberry tree,
these rose benches where

we ate our bread and wine -
they will carry on.

Ten days green
in the quarantine,

as the numbers
combed upwards,

always upwards,
enough to make one

invoke Jeffers.
Sitting beside you

at spring tide
at Sandymount -

the sea will carry on.
The canal face,

blushed with swan,
it, too, will carry on.

And now you and I,
on the sunken patio,

in ruined deck chairs
sitting and watching

the sun splash in -
carrying on.

There were
those thickets
of flat
graying trees
and a frozen
skin of lake
out by the
hunched rink
behind Georgian Woods
the terrace apartments
where Dad lived
after he left
the family.

Left to my
own devices
while Dad
delved in books
I slipped out
the sliding door
through
the frost-grass
and the
snow branch gap
into the
unfolding stillness
of the drowsing park.
Sometimes
my sister
was there
with me
in the woods,
our play
always some form
of running away.

In the early
years Dad
smoked a pipe
his thick
blue rug scented
with Captain Black
**** tobacco,
the white tin
with the rigged
ship logo.
The humming silo
of the air purifier
Dad's concession
to my convulsing
asthmatic chest,
close-gathered lung

like the branch bark
that scraped
my lip
as I ran in
the park wood,
blood slipping
across my face
and down
into the ache.

Who stands off the square?
    The Monday girl,
    blond with rain.
Where have I followed her?
    Through the canyons
    of the eight o'clock city.
And what does this mean?
    I have always felt
    that she knows me.
How alone am I?
    The moon curdles
    and crumbles.
And now that she leaves?
    Embrace the green air triangle
    that spreads out shining
    with wet, fog climbing
    from my mouth as I chew
    cloud after cloud,
    forcing the world to accept
    my abstracting template
    rather than face it,
    face it, that she's gone.

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.

Someone I could kiss
Has left his, her
             tracks
             A memory
            Heavy as winter breathing
            in the snow
-Elise Cowen


A white cloud caul brooms back
from the blue jeans baby above,

& a lemon blotch veil settles
over a moss-pocked branch facet.

Slow and chilly the afternoon
peels into memory fingers -

pleasant and strange, like sugar
stuck under the tongue.

I audit odd thoughts:
ephemeral *** reflections

are gauzy in the middle distance,
trapped in a basin of lost things;

grief is colossal, a leviathan
washed in from yesterday

to blight the snubbed beach slant.
In between are a thousand thousand

blacknesses between starry points...
Speckled with desire, I am witness:

the blanching cloud caul is broken
& a day-head blooms from a glass.

Where are you?
They buried you
in a sleep in the air
so I must mourn you
everywhere;
even with this poem,
this cenotaph,
this memorial
to the notches
you left inside
your son.

We who went into the 4 a.m. of the world
regretting nothing but an unfinished song.

We who were murdered in the darkest lanes
and at the corner of the street.

I was much further out than you thought,
starless and fatherless, a dark water -

rescue me from this ocean.
In this part of the story I am the one who

changes minute by minute.
Beauty is the sole business of poetry -

I go on loving you like water but
every night fire breaks out from windows in Üsküdar.

Sing whatever is well made,
every man that sings a song:

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
of night and light and the half-light,
you are more beautiful than any one.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire,
I swear before the dawn comes round again
to love you in the old high way of love.

I know that I shall meet my fate
though now it seems impossible, and so
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
the time for you to taste of that salt breath -
What is there left to say?

Sword lilies
play in the noon.
The spending sun
is a yellow wild.
We drink champagne
for the hell of it,
because and
because.

I carry you
with twining
laughter to
the bedroom.
The sloping thigh
of night, under
a palm moon.

You nestle into the
crook of my arm,
movies play out in
green breath foam.
We drink
paper planes.

We drink gin, too.
The squares of London
skirt your legs
as we dream
with lavender.

You annihilate
with your merest
gesture as we turn
Turkish vinyl.

Cursive stars are
scrawled with
new romance.

We drink champagne
for the hell of it,

because and because.

How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
-Emily Dickinson


Each body has its own agenda:
Her? Her criss-cross brain flings

scrawls of knuckled candlelight
across the mystery of his face.

Him? His bursting nerves waver,
tremble on the blue patio

where her dress is ascending.
Leaves rug the streets under

coffeed eyes that survey it all
before scoring down the lane.

Murderers must be walking by;
lovers sending frantic texts;

hermits of the plague
smoking furtively in alley skirts.

Bodies are traitors, always asking
for one thing but needing another,

wanting another, planning another.
This body wants hands to find it;

yet pricked with poems,
stiletto-sharp, this body

is browned with night, inhabited
by cascades: is aimed at you.

Back then, there
were no goodbyes,
and tomorrows
I swallowed like
chartreuse. Evening
buttons undone.
Bones whistled night.
Birds slipped as fire
rifled the yard.
I wanted to cry,
sweet-haired, low
with breath, as
someone built a myth
and then broke it.
The years deviled,
pears wasted away.
There were no goodbyes,
and tomorrows were
lost in the eye.

A woman on the walk
chews on a white gap
that hovers in the tree.

A fleet of dead clouds,
dull gummy bumps,
reflect our hunched signals.

Even the road is false,
a mouth of crushed oil husks
that eats our fried blood.

This all collects into an afternoon
of chemical mistakes.
Thoughts that spongily refold.

We're reading with flashlights
under a shared blanket of grief,
eyes shining; incandescent wax.

So this is fallout -
The trees are choking
with ghosts that hang
like windchimes
from each atomic bough.
This is the aftermath.
The steam has long
since escaped, the cores
are ruined settlements
that glow furious gloam.
We carry them
with us, hearts knock
beat to beat, churning
something heavy
that already hardens.
Angels decay.
Summer is columns
& columns of them
carelessly spilling
into the empty
cooling pond.
What happened
to us? Years went
wrestling by
into the abyss. Clawing
to the surface,
this is what is left.
The trees are coughing
with ghosts.
I take you
and place you
gently among them.

I drank deep
of the
pink heads.

I let the
whiteness
of the petal
shake my
face from
the day.

The wind
came cold
from the
basin,
sweeping
my hair
into
dusk
shapes.

The jealous
magnolia
branch,
heavy with
wax,
was drunk
with ascendance.

In all of this
I felt the
wildness
crawling
in me.

It longed
for you.
When I drank
deep of
the pink
heads -
I thought
only of
your name.

This morning's cigarette
I bought at the airport in Rome.
It wavers in a cold district
as I question my romances.

Dear cigarette, little acid stub
on a tile, you lived your span
in a long winding fume:
May my own life stick
to her hands like smoke.

It's around noon
& snow softens
to white puddles
in the street.

I'm standing
at 7th and Penn
& to the south
is a memory,
just a shape
in the air,
bent by a tree,
a little car,
a piece of lawn.

To the north is
what they now call
Chinatown,
where spelling
"*******" in
Chinese characters
is enough
to qualify.

There's no gloss
on the water.
Winter wets
my feet
in gray laps.
I still have
errands to do.

What is this church
we've made for ourselves,
with elm-groved nave,
& grass-paved aisle?

What religion
did we raise here,
with insect hymns
of a spotted choir?

What gods did we move
under the maple,
tongues rolling,
chatting with lightning?

Rainwater buttress,
twilight altar, homily -
we built this green chapel
in the ribs of the vale

and practiced our love
in a pink-stained light,
where we were crying
out for one another.

Cinder-headed,
I swim smoked
tea until tongue's
angles of ash.

Marbling ache,
eyes threaded
with fever, skin
rides every last

avenue in the air.
Thoughts scatter,
ice diary desolate,
cinder-headed.

I will make us coffee,
& you will make us tea -
in leaves and grounds
our fortunes found,
& and what is meant to be.