Stay in
late on Sunday,
when sleeves of keening rain
drape downcast hollies by the street.
Come here...

Your hair is a coy half-veil
across a bewitching smile.
Breathing comes a little quicker,
brown eyes fill with liquor -
good god, but you beguile.

The cloud pulls apart,
a two-headed ripple
in a towering sepulcher
blue as a peacock.
I am a witness,
possibly the only one,
to this bright death.
This, then, is the memorial
of something that lived
as a waver in the upmost field
for just a few minutes,
slain by the unfaithful breeze.

Laces even
as sutures
carry midnight miles
at the black river,
the broken-backed
streets of Georgetown,
a silent yard
of snow roses.

The anvil of night
just stops there,
& the chandelier
of air tightens
slight as wire.
Vaults of cold
ache in their arches,
as back windows
broadcast lives
vaguely beyond
fraying wreathes
of fog.

This is a city
of runners.
Thousands
cut open
the moment
& burn flight
onto the winter weave.
Skin is song.
The heart cants
forward, leaning
into the fallaway.
Always forward,
always forward,
runners sing -
there is nowhere
else to go.

Errant firework in the distance,
folding sun in a west bed.
The evening is dying, canceling
away in the purple shade.
I walk south, west, west,
until I'm on the mirrored water,
a new Narcissus in the valley,
among the rusted thighs of the city.

Everything is a memory of her;
the cocktails, the coffee, the sherry,
the faint scent of rosewater,
the long theater grass.
But now it's cleared away
by ice cream men and sirens
as far as the river steps,
the descent into the sunken palace.

An orange layer blankets the evening flow,
& the haunted asphalt is a black spine
of humid trees. She is gone,
but her outline remains everywhere.
Tonight I'll wander to the whisky bar
& buy forgetfulness.
A distant sky presses in;
this place is far from everything.

I feel your thoughts turn
in the wild plum twilight,

as we stroll from
the crooked grocery

to the empire
of mauve carpets.

Your hand draws tight.
Your eye is wet and sharp.

You don't need to say it,
I know the hue and tint

of your just heart,
I feel the cutting wave.

In Arabic, "poetry"
is related to "hair" -

both things sense
the world so finely.

Well, let this poem
know you as gently

as your Rapunzel's hair
knows the evening air

winding through silver
avenues of moon.

Your halo combs
through the steam
trellis.  Old sprays
of Baltimore sugar
fan across the table
by a salt whisper.
The white steeple
of creamer with red
lamassu prowling
anchors the coffee
shop's Tuesday
crucible. I drink
mine cold as you
sketch the bustle.
When I leave for
the office, your art
eye is still tight
as a lens, amid
the brunette shots
of night-hearted
espresso, the cluck
of the businessmen,
and the steam tree
that wakes you away.

O xanthous brickwork, your scars
canted with shadow... my mirror platter
cries on the left hand side, and cool air
settles in the burnished tree tops.

It's almost October and the days just pile
on top of each other without any meaning in them.
I wet my face at the vessel, soap to soak,
waiting for the death of the aloe flower

that perches on its lonely stalk,
defiant and sorrowful, tendril shaking
in a cold busker's breeze.
Scuttling traffic claws into the dim hour,

the sun wests away; brick goes dark,
browning like steak. The air rises
into the ape-hour to meet the landslide
of dead angels flickering across the band.

The crowd
busies itself
selling lemons
and shoes,
but beneath
the sweeping
scrapes of wall,
a pyramid
of eyes
greeds for
a death.

16 miles and change,
26,000 steps
end with the ten
to the absinthe bottle
and back to bed,
dizzy with heartbreak.

I spent years
trying to change,
but I am more myself
than ever before.
The truth slips
over my neck.
My eye is dark.
Absinthe vanishes
from the glass
smooth as vapor.

She invited
my deepest hurts
so I gave them
in cries that
sunk into her
shoulder blade,
more than I've
given to anyone.

Time is a broken floe,
drifting and cold.
I am more myself
than ever before.
I wish I wasn't,
Oh god I wish
I wasn't.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

The market of sleep
   is full of false starts
& the gingery moon's
   just a pock-marked heap.

Down in the office
   there's a tunnel of nothing
& tongues are falling
   with heavy high profits.

Brown hair of fall
   blue legs of summer,
fumble the moment's
   drift-hearted crawl.

The night sky is only
   a black dead dough,
& late in the morning
   hands are so lonely.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

I've been drunk for days.
Last year we were to be married -
this year I have a bleeding ulcer
& I cry every morning,
medicated with scotch.
Your name is a meadow.

I was a winter's seventeen
as I stared out the window
of an old 91 Pontiac
at two in the morning
& saw the golden grass
churning the leaking dark
of the middle school meadow.
The moon died, was reborn
to a scaffold's womb.
We stayed up, but didn't speak.
Not even when we saw
amber hands gripping the field brow,
arranging the morning.
She started the car in the strip lot
& stole me home.

I read that
courting words
are sweet
as honey.

No,
courting words
are breaths
held long -
courting words
are labyrinths
of nettles.

The first thing that happens
is the world collapses.
That is, it reduces down
but only I seem to notice.
Everything becomes flatter,
the depth stripped away
like rotted lumber,
like when they gut a building
but leave the historic facade,
and I feel like I'm limping
postcard to postcard
until eventually like I'm peering
into a discarded diorama,
where everything is smaller
than it should be,
the crudest copy of itself, and
everything is bounded
by shoebox limits
I can sense them everywhere.

The second thing that happens
is that I avoid everyone.
I avoid my mother on Christmas,
I can't look my therapist in her eye,
I cancel a date because
I can't handle the contact.
I touch my skin and it's like
touching paper that's been creased
hundreds of times -
old pulp that frays and splits.

The third thing that happens
is that I lose interest.
I put in whatever minimums
the day requires
and not a scratch more.
I put my mail aside
and watch crows
gather on the branch,
facing the valley,
black eye to black eye,
base wings folded against
the sleek unbearable body.

The last thing that happens
is that life cheapens.
It's hard not to notice,
since the papers and the news
and everybody's phone
blasts forth the parade of death.
No one is spared, children,
animals, the happy, the hale.
And soon these thoughts -
that life ends without reason,
that God has retreated from the world,
that no step is worthwhile -
begin to bleed in my head.
They lead to the paralysis
of a patient wrapped in gauze,
leaving only the eyes free to move
and notice the great black wing
that scythes into the valley,
feathers dark as stout,
the sun setting in its usual
incompetent way, the wing
so graceful that it might be
the only beautiful thing,
falling out of sight,
into nothingness,
down the *****
into the stale dusk,
into the exact center
of a limitless depression.

Though I always try,
I am not always a
creature of grace.

Sometimes I open the
same foolish veins
as everyone else.

I can look back
in sadness and anger
& feel like hell about it.  

One worry masquerades
as the other - hard
to tell them apart.

But once you've pulled
it together, at the bottom
are the unassailable truths.

It doesn't take grace
to know your heart,
only a hard-won trust.

There is always
a little uncertainty
& a little worry.

It always pays to be
alive and open to the
width of the world.

And, darling, there are
people like you
for whom it's all worth it.

The statues are eyeless in Iveagh,
ruins under leafed eaves,

effaced, pitted, blotted,
benighted green and wet:

they have heard far more love
than mine and hers, witnessed

others filled with beer, wine,
& whiskey. Forbidden fruit

rots on the branch. Magpies gather
by blue knees, curious and hopeful.

Crimes of the heart were committed
on that night. The sound of the river

sinewed through the cracked window.
The past was father of the present,

the sheets were stained sails.
Coffee was brewing in the evening,

corks rolled into corners,
whiskey emptied the memory.

Now it's years, years later:
I just walked on water,

the river would not collapse beneath me.
A friend sent me neon letters,

rain is due tomorrow,
and the kittens are restless.

I open a bottle. My lovely neighbor
is building a mirror before dinner,

she borrows a screwdriver.
I am guilty of everything you said.

I am guilty: but there is no jury
who would ever convict.

Rude, infant cloud,
stamping east -
will you carry
something for me?
Bleachy lump, shroud,
linen's careless crease
in bloodless aerie,
trawl a lyric to quay.
White-headed, bowed
beneath high fleece,
insolent taffy, ferry
over salt-rutted sea:
Take them, these words -
before I ask the birds.

I'm hanging above
a checkered floor,
Lucy's on the other side
singing La Vie En Rose.

I wonder for a moment
if I could love you
into loving me,
but let's face it:

it's never worked before.
When she hits Night Shift
and I think how the lines
knock me out one by one

I just let go.
I shift against the bar
and serve as
my own self-prophet:

"I'll tell you when
I'm dying of something"

In 1992 a major storm tore
the rented beach finger,

ten foot whitecaps yawning
in a horizon of clenched tar.

I walked with mom
through clews of wind

& saw conches strewn
on down the dying strand:

bleached comma fragments
among the bolting towel skins.

The sea was standing there
on foaming legs, fully awake now,

green glass tongues hissing,
a death myth of muscle,

smiles and grimaces
& lolls and swallows,

all at once, synchronous.
More alive than any god.

Blue dregs are hanging
each to each on the line,  

& ash tendons pull
as cirrus takes the stair.

Overflowing night is emptied
in the twine of our sleep,

& we wake, suspended
in our own eye.

There is a silver splash
perched in the bathroom

where the hand finds itself
encased in breath,

a throwaway gesture that drifts
over to the new corner,

& finds shape as your face,
shielded in cloud.

Soft cerise band
& slate speckled
with cream cloud -
light birthed on a hill.

Night unslips its hand,
ultramarine, star-freckled,
from mintish trees bowed
low over dew-dappled sill.

Today I walked wet streets
strangely sheeted with pennies,

as slant light burnished coil after coil
of hair outside red-***** Macy's,

& the wind pulled open the liquor
doors in the middle of the block.

I missed her as I crossed the blank
green language of grass,

I missed her as I slipped through iron
railings into rain's only face,

I missed her as I hailed the bus on E st
& drifted into a shining glitch.

I lipped a Gauloises and observed
the body of smoke being born.

Then, just before this poem ended,
night appeared in my pocket,

next to the leather and the money,
& it was so hungry, so lonely.

I sheathed the sharpness of my eyes
in pity, and missed her all the more.

Creeping phlox blossoms, star-blanched,
crawl gently in choir in the thunder yard,
like soft fare for the silver river fee.

Linen immortelle, shadow-bleared,
knotted aegis against a raw, wracking world:
smeary cloth-stalks lengthen duskily.

Rain-pinked palm, sloe-blotched:
tawny token of revival from those
who idle beneath rude thunderheads.

There I am, in the cold glass:
looking back at my half-self.

Beyond me, my neighbors bundle
in and out of their kitchens,

parcel from bedroom to bathroom
in their sweatshirts, pajamas,

their old night clothes.
I just watch from a black shell

that fumes and blossoms
with hasty glasses of *****.

I sit in the dark because
there is no one who will visit -

I feel bones under the skin.
I feel how thin it all is.

I gave myself away for years, but
the lights are all snapped off now,

even the gaslights are turned off.
Streetlights rescind their beams.

My neighbors never look back out
into the street. Their eyes are flattened

with yesterdays and tomorrows.
Their yellow squares go low.

We, all of us, hear the song that slips
from the moon pocket, calls the frost.

My heart is tabletop -
the rest of me is the filled-in border
of jigsaw pieces, hanging teeth
around a maw; the middle is missing.

I am also the beheading bluejay
slicing the tendons of greenery
that waver in the rain lens
imprinting on glass and shadow.

I wait on street corners
for specks of truth, beauty;
"That is all ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know" and all that.

But I have a quicksand heart -
step and drown.
Wreathes of blood shiver inside
in murderous curtains.

I vanish in front of you:
This world has no middle in it,
& what little remains is draining out,
teeth strewn in a garden.

Once, I was a man standing
in an airport, holding her -
a meadow of sweet, a hand
that browsed my secret self,
an incandescent eye that found
a gasp in the gap. And then I wasn't -
stripped of my companion,
I succumbed to whisky's scalpel,
lonely's pollution.
Now, fringing a sorrowful noon shush,
I watch an orange crossbeam throb
of crawling sun die by my foot;
considering this, I meditate in this glass,
pushing whisky into myself with serious intent,
pinned down by choices that are not mine;
the days slouch forward, despite themselves.

In the Paris giftshop
the one deep wing
of the vermilion angel
lanced the outer dark.

Outside,
draping olive lines
scattered and resolved
abstractly as trees.

The world was
filled with
incompleteness.

Back home,
with the second wife,
the night was fragrant
with barbeque,
nicotine,
& vetiver.

Having no direction,
I drifted into
the smoking rain.

Years later
there is an arrival
that thickens like glass,
a transparency,
a screen that flickers.

It's her, and
she's red-orange too.

An investment,
a face in gold leaf,
a pale labyrinth.

This time,
years later,
the deep wing
is a drifting veil,
and the olive line
connects us
like boardwalk string.

The glow of the glass
is a resolution.

The Winged Nike
of Samothrace
is installed inside me:
first the anxiety
of the reach,
straining for more.

Then the frozen music,
the perfect shape, even
with pieces missing.

Orange buttons
of repetitive sun
crush up against
thin folded dresses
of blued cloud:
You send me
earnest self-portraits
& my cantilevered
eye is oh-so-yours.

The sunset strides
one more chestnut
step, and I remember
how you laughed
when your shirt
parted for my
tickling hand:
even the moon
was up on its toes
hoping to see
the bright heave
& glow of your skin.

[...] a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.
But how far can it swim out through the eyes.
-John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror


Greasy brown sun smeared over hill,
buttering palm trees, melting in bay.

The Pacific shuffles cold and blue,
Spanish roof is red tooth grin,

irregular and hungry. Day clatter,
hurly burly in the sand pine,

& I'm phasing out, a laugh
lost in sway grass.

Conversations carry late
with new old cousins.

My mind rattles and clots,
needs ballast. Shush. Shush:

fog rises from the sea,
it never stops arriving.

April is poured
from oak barrels
until I'm dipso.
The last winter
stars pacific,
crawling,
humid jewelry -
scrape velvet
over this cheap bed.

Happy dream
of the late
night metro,
each sleeping face
silver and serene.
The air
conditioning leans
across the aisle
as if to whisper
something.

Endorphins rush
these frays
of nerve
like an infantry.
Sleep must come
on wings
of whiskey
that ****** forward,
swimming
in the dark.

My gravid eye
opens a gaze
on you,
strafes under
grayling cloud,
attaches to a memory
& bites into the
blue-green night
with cigarette teeth.

Then you leave,
skipping across
the undone
waters who calve
cities that split
like onions. Whiskey
beads on your fingers
in the wood-dark bar.

Lover, how you
braid my blood...
Your plural beauty
rests on the elbows
of Istanbul, and
in the same moment
it arrives here,
a splitting whisper
in winter's pavilion.
I crave the crisp
pear of your voice,
the sail's spurt
of your body,
the quiet galleries
of your soul.

So return quickly,
I'm lost in
the night streets
without you.

The steeple tree is always falling
today in the wood your hand
the flower walk and the
long east of it, the last one
Trish the bar four pints
distress bit lip call
Yes, I know it's, Yes
taffy-pink sky, orange stripe
leaning up, it stutters
hers, the place is, evenfall
& the bird-perch pole
wipe the hair slowly across
bare and my skin a garment
No, it's ok, I'm ok
a tightness gathering
"heaven blotted region."

O cyclopean sun,
mounting and diving
the broad chamber,
blue over blind,
yellow rhyme,
lambent cirrus-stained eye...
I walk your heart.

In the legend of the lovers Tristan and Iseult, there is a small, magical, immortal dog named Petitcrieu who "ate half the sadness of everyone he met." He didn't gift any type of forgetfulness, but instead bestowed the ability to bear the sorrow easily.


Bells are ringing wet and pink
on a muscled shoreline of skin,

lining me with their tolling.
Their knell is so heavy in the ear,

it sinks into the sand chokes
trapped on my frozen tongue.

Someone great has vanished again.
The clang and clatter escapes

out of this red chest oven,
bangs around the wild world.

Grief is announced, by way
of cacophony. Where are the dogs?

The ones who eat our sadness
with their bellish barking?

Who look into our brief eyes
& remove the worst of the sting?

Who serve the moon, defy the sun?
They have gone missing.

Sorrow rushes through the waters
a blued frigate with a headwind,

overtaking the heart, the head,
the curried spine...

In this age, sadness is the magazine
that all of us are reading.

Join me beneath
an eight percent moon
that shook itself free
from Irish holly
on its way to
bearded stone.
Agent of itself,
it little cares what
we'll do here,
in this rose garden
of shadow flighting.
Join me in the sliver
of tinnish light
that wanes into the berries,
& shove your breath
into mine with clear intent.
We wear dresses of silence.
The mottling dark
clenches your hair.
A faceless statue
chaperones no one.

A club of sun
down Upshur St
breaks our talk
of pink noise.

Interrupted quilts
of cloud are shyly
unlaced in the stillness
of the afternoon.

I turn your face
toward the green
tunnel of park,
but you're not looking.

Come and cure me,
if you can,
vertical man:

there's ice in the glass,
& rain-blacked grass,
as if by plan,

& a loosened sea
is a sad blue band -
this horizontal man

needs your cure,
Dr. A'Bunadh,
so don't detour.

I have
this
daydream
where
you are
drawing,
writing,
and I'm
composing
another
nocturne,
and the
nail of
sun
falls
& falls.

O,
your
talents...!
I sing
of them,
in this
lyric
and its
brothers
& sisters.

They are
gifts
that
wing
through
the alchemy
of your
blood.

I feel it,
too,
when the
music
must be
thrown
from my
fingers
or die
of rust.

I feel it
when
poems
climb
from the
garden
behind
my eyes.

I feel it
in you.
Darling,
draw for me,
draw for me.

1980s,
America,
in a field.

I have a baseball,
and I'm throwing
& retrieving it.

At the edge of
the field is
a pine forest.

The forest is
unnaturally
still.

I'm afraid of it -
maybe it's
my subconscious,

maybe it's
death,
maybe it's just

the unknown.
Eventually,
I throw the ball

so deep
into the air,
a perfect arc,

that it enters
the forest's
edge. Slowly,

I go to find it.
Just inside
the forest

are strange
& hideous
snarls,

& then
something pushes
me down.

All the grass
in the field
turns black

in one moment.
The last thing
I see before the end

is the closing pines,
they're hungry,
so hungry.

You
try on
the white
dress
with the
blossoms
across
your
*******,
the pink
dress
with the
cherries
stamped
on your
body,
purple
stockings
peeking
from
the hem
held
bashfully
in hand.

When
I saw
you
my
multiple
heart
could
crush
angels.

This
cloth,
cut close
with
the lust
of spring,
given
to your
dizzy
shape,
carries
me.

My
heart, a
palanquin
for yours.

Drink with me,
at the Mexican restaurant
on the wharf that serves
mezcal with chili salt,
we'll talk about all the things
no one wants to talk about.  
The lost loves, the harsh
self-treatment, the way
you're recovering nicely.
I'll share oysters,
but I'll leave soon,
my mind full of her,
full of her, full of her.

Let intensities
drop away -

leave chains
behind you.

A forest's
bathing sway

enough
to bind you.

Release the
dying day,

so stillness yet
might find you -

quiet starts
to breathing's arts.

Drunk on Hirschorn lawn,
all the sculptures rise
& take to air, bronze over bronze.
She floats the cocked corner
of my eye, a wince under glint
of gangly windows glazed
blankly across glossy estate.
Drunk again at noon, drawn
in by hurt - she surprises
with reproval - though it spawns
first in the self-soul, first mourner
at the living funeral. O Jennie, minting
through this garden with cotton grace,
tolerate a dazed smile today, amid the statuary.

Drunk in the Hirschhorn garden,
it seems  the sculptures rise
and take to air, bronze on bronze.
Swear as sweat drops in the corner
of the eye, squint against mounting glint
of the polished windows that gaze
so blankly over the glossy green estate.
Drunk again at noon, and hardened
by hurt against the friend who surprises
with criticism: she must realize it spawns
first inside the soul? First mourner
at my living funeral. O Jennie, swimming
through the garden with your cotton grace,
tolerate my dazed smile, amid the statuary.

Soft as poached yolk,
nightlights dot the Liffey -
you are a snow dream
in a black gallery.

The walk from bed
to office is littered
with impatient dogs,
tongues floating
above the brick walk.

Spice trees front the embassy
and lean into the morning's shape.
Each step farther from you
is a ballet of snow
upon the brain.

This poem has moved beneath me.  
No melancholy pang can withstand
a white sail smile.

Embers stinging the clouds,
soot settling on a line -

black flake rain
is stirring.

Here is a new sleep,
where I find myself.

Laying in the cascade,
the phone's young flood

assembles your hair -
I'm reminded of my flight

across the salt,
to the place where you are.

This city's graved flecks
are forgotten; I've left them

for a green kingdom
in another pattern.

Earhart is static.
In Pacific attics,
searchers hunt smoke,
fold maps, pragmatic.
But the search for fires stoked
with brush is done. She provoked
the upper angels unprepared,
and was broken.
It’s so clear, all the air
over this sea: no twist or glare
blots the view for miles,
though magnetic snares
****** with fields of smiles
the wayward compass, routes
drift from proscribed aisles.
Did she ditch in the blue mute
expanse, flare's salute
a last hope to unwind miles?
Planes get drawn back. It's moot.

Oyster shells of light
peer through the Y
in a bare tree.

Night has moved on
to California or somewhere
out on the ocean.

But the new day, it aches,
the grass drowns in dew.
I see my loved one

in a week, and until then
I am getting a little tired
of clouds burning like sugar.