My face, knotted in the shopfront glass,
then smeared smooth, unfolding

in strangest waves and furls
until it's me again, the mask restored.

I do this several times. Step left,
I'm a minotaur, a funhouse scream,

a maze-horror, a twist and blink.
Step right, the pane straightens me

into a mid-life crisis.
But I can't help but wonder

if it's like a coat hanger:
once bent, never really true again;

the mirror regurgitates destinies
as casually as How Do You Do.

I wander down the walk and wonder
if my eye is still slivered and daubed

into a blanched, branched pool
of wild milk spoiling in the open air.

Night-hinted marriage
& old story ******* -
then another mono morning,
my mind a mountainside.
When I almost make you late,
your face so serious,
my polished misericorde
slips between the shining
plates, it knows with such
precision where to cut.
It's a proving hour,
long ices of thought,
before I pull it out. You
rest your head against me
& I imagine dropping
the blade into a scabbard
of blue hydrangeas.
I ask of you, if I lay down
beneath your troubles,
empty my unhappy hand.

We lunch on dust.
We wake, wage our campaigns

of mistakes across a quiet,
wary, unwaving old world.

No greeting, no parting,
no arriving, no leaving -

we are jabs in the air,
crudely curbed animal feints,

& then our names are packed away
& left forgotten in a taxi,

or in a train station bathroom,
or in a fray of rain.

Don't think too hard about it;
that, too, is a mistake.

Woe to the world, the sun is in a cloud,
And darksome mists do overrun the day;
In high conceit, is not content allowed;
Favour must die and fancies wear away.
O heavens, what hell! The bands of love are broken,
Nor must a thought of such a thing be spoken.
-Robert Devereaux

Goodbye, mockingbird -
I must leave you now.
I have often watched you
hash across the yard
from your holly station,
chop chop chop with such vim,
from the leaf to the post
to the high-lidded lamp
that surveys the night dispassionately.

In return, how ungrateful I have been -
what terrible things
I have offered your shining bead
of an eye. In your tenure
on the gray-green sill
you have listened to the sharp salt
of my many difficulties
with perfect equanimity.

But now I must go.
Perhaps you will find me,
across the living ruins
of this capital city,
in the raining triangle
that corners down to Dupont.
Or perhaps you will stay sentinel
over this nest, deep in the green.
I will miss you, little bird.
My two brightest years
passed under your wing.

The clock was set back,
and now night rots
away the afternoon.
Gray light spills,
slouches, sloughs
into my hair,
my hands, across
all these strangers.

Ovals of alcohol
keep the rain away.
My life is moving
stave by stave.
I used to go to school,
have a social circle,
idle through hobbies,
new days, new days.
What the hell happened?

Like burning marshmallow,
the clouds this Monday.
Thumb over the phone
& the words to you pop
& sway like gin pink
with bitters. Lily lady,

O my lily lady,
kiss me marshmallow -
sticky and tinted pink
with lip on a rainy Monday.
Green window pops
arrive on my phone,

this sweet black phone
that brings you, my lady,
over Atlantic's salt pop
& volted marshmallow.
So on this Monday
when the sky draws pink,

& clouds too are toasted pink,
I take this thin phone
and find you. On this Monday,
my Dublin lady,
under a melting marshmallow
sky, I seek out your hot pop,

that flame that's popping
in the twilight, red and pink.
Sweet as marshmallow,
you burn through my phone,
my smiling lily lady,
even on a Monday.

& so this Monday
like a soap bubble pops.
I'm inspired, my lady,
by the silken pink
thing. On your phone,
a swan's wing of marshmallow.

Yes - Monday's poem comes pink,
& pops with phone messages
from my lady, soft as marshmallows.

Moonflower,
sewn through the trellis
with your lemon scent,
breasted nocturne blossom,
your intense distaste for the
bardiche sun that swings
across the high meridians,
how I favor you -

I will be your vambrace,
your cuirass, your sabaton -
your ancient metal shadows
that cool you from
swipe of day,
     my moonflower,
until the short-sleeve
freedoms of night.

O moon, I will save you.
I watch you rise in the daytime,
stunned by the squat cancer blue,
overcome by snappings of cloud,
letting go the night-anchors,
looking lost up there.
I passed out, drunk
for the second time today
& when I woke up,
you were broadcasting
several degrees deeper
into a fool's gold evening,
a sickly sweet beacon, luminous
almost to the point of absurdity,
I saw all your seas and mounds
unskirted. You seem alarmed,
watching my wounds so closely,
yet absent of gesture,
an affixed milk-marrow.

I will save you, moon;
after all, I am your Sisyphus:
I push and push at you
with these soaking stanzas
& each night you tumble back.  
Do you remember rising over
the Hotel Tiquetonne in Paris,
when I tried to prize you
from your socket
above the church in Les Halles,
& give you to her?
But you resisted, so I exchanged you
like currency; the stars so fluent,
bands of bleach in your halo,
you grew hair that fell out
in screaming stripes,
& I ate tartare at midnight.

O moon, I know now
that I cannot save you -
if anything, you must come
& claim me away.
You seem happy in your tides,
so certain in your arc and arch,
the delight of little elevations
in the black valleys.
You are the knot in the bark,
celestial gland, eternal bone
that rules over all bones -
so come and get me.
O steady eye-knuckle,
someday you will rise
over a world that is unencumbered
by my step; by any step.
In its last days, the earth
will call you home,
long after my memories
of Tiquetonne seep into loam.

Cyclical cinder, little ash,
you will not weep -
you will not weep,
O salvage moon,
but will transmit the final stanzas
of a requiem to a world
that cannot speak your tongue,
but will understand the paleness
of a poem that is dying.

I am staring out
at the black shoulder
that fell an hour ago
across the yard lap,
thinking about it again:
that love is a game
with no way to win;
but you can lose more slowly.

The sun is loathe to rise.
Beige, bored,
morning crutches
to some kind of
vertical birth.
Your rain plinth
glissandos don't
quite make it here;
I get cerulean void.
When the sun
finally coughs up
a gray beam
over the bellies
of tenements,
I've moved on,
to the seethe
of your notice.

Sgailc-nide - the first morning drink, taken while still laying flat on your back

A caustic belt of autumn sun
flings itself through the glass,
yolk wasted across the blood-rug.

Last night's final slug
of scotch sits waiting
on the blackcloth nightstand.

I gather it into my fist,
take a look at the blue syrup
of morning light...

I will tell you all
that the first morning shot
glows like a new blind heart.

This future is mad with silence,
while the past asserts itself
in lost faces, so many lost faces.

I have a bruise on my face
that I can't recall getting.
I don't remember the evenings,

although last night I cut my hair
with a rattling metal hand
that sharped at the skull.

Each morning is a scrape.
I don't recognize this lonely man
in the acid sluice of mirror.

Froichd-uilinn - the second drink of the day, taken while propped up on your elbow

I sink my bones, crooked in mattress,
lower the liquor to lip as calving sun
leaks through the east-faced pane.

I think back to La Fontaine Sully
in La Marais, on the way back
from the graveyard...

But to what profit?
My memory slices me open,
revealing a slow web of star-gutted stairs.

"Immer augen" my grandmother says,
or said, or will say. The street slouches
with honey-feet, red wine drips into the river.

Fashionable diners spread themselves
across the sidewalk. Laughter launches
like stones into this tower window.

Old thoughts are a slaughter.
A marriage didn't happen.
Bright lights against the meat-black

of night, the shroud-cloth
over my own face, lips wet
& shining with liquor.

Deoch Chas-ruisgte - the third drink of the day, taken while still barefoot

Face to face with soap-fingered morning,
an abyss bounded by vapor trails,
an unblinking eye stares back from the glass.

Once, I woke with a lover in this bed,
her hands braced against my back,
as if keeping me from falling.

Now the daylight is my chilly crutch,
a mocking rain-ring sliding over
the madhouse orange of the turning trees.

When I was a child, I was left to my own devices;
you'd think solitude wouldn't poison me this way -
yet even the afternoon breeze shaves me down.

The little cat and the sunbeam
do their daily pas de deux
while I think about the blood-flower

that emerged from an angel's mouth.
A year of snow-tides, of shipwrecks...
Oh, god...

Deoch Bhleth - the fourth drink of the morning, taken while the morning oats are being ground

The heart is drowned in dream
as the body motions towards coffee,
whisky, water, pills.

November slouches in slowly,
all sharp shoulders
& muscular knees.

The black circle turns and screams,
the beacon spits morning news,
an island of misery emerges from the salt-froth.

The wet streets are slicked to a shine;
I've gained weight. The day moon
is pregnant with blue.

Blood is thin and slippery in the vein.
The razor leaves fine lines all across my face.
My arm is singing. Psalms drop from the sleek

yellow womb of the ****** sun.
Alcohol climbs within me: I fall back on the bed,
thinking of her again. Where is she?

Is she staring out at the magpies
that gather on the wet lunch-branch?
Is she by the Liffey, watching the slate glint?

I am trapped in this plaster tomb,
my head a bridge between past and present;
somewhere a chain is being broken.

Mother hit me
with the cutting
board for years -

until it broke
across my five
year old body.

She's mourned the
board ever since,
apparently it was
a real favorite.

Then she'd chase
me, with her hand
like a mouth, saying

"Alligator, alligator,"
and pinching me
terribly if she
caught me,

laughing,
laughing,
she was
laughing.

I.

Tim collapsed in the bathroom
of the cheap-grease pizza place
where he slogged away idles,

hole in arm. When he came back
from the hospital, I asked why
& he had nothing. A few years

went by and I saw him at a bonfire
& he said, hey, do you remember
that old knife game, mumbletypeg?

Well, it's not the knife flying,
not the blade sinking and shaking,
not the thrill of almost-pain,

it's getting low to the ground
hearing the world get quiet
as you grab the sharpness,

visiting a hungry paradise,
tasting the watery loam in teeth.
"I want to feel the most."

II.

Tim got sober and died
to a wrong way drunk driver.
By then we all knew life

wasn't fair, but this was unnecessary
cruelty by the gods or not-gods
or whoever is cutting threads.

At the next bonfire after that
we remembered him in slices,
how he always wanted to feel

"the most" - how he'd sit
at glazed parties with guitar in lap,
toying with that Metallica solo

to One with his tarnished silver
spider's hands, his eyes covered
in shine as he played softly

an easy laugh readied,
mind full to bursting,
maybe with mumbletypeg.

New Year's Eve dark at 4:30,
a dilation like a pleasured eye:
stray clouds pull themselves
across the clarity

& stars smudge unreasonably
across taffy-thin years of light,
long inviting blears.
I am peeling away from myself,

half-drunk on the absence of grief,
half-drunk on my lovely neighbor's wine:
it's funny how little moments
can pull together the murmuration

into a pattern you can hold:
I feel possibilities, sour morsels
of old dreams going loose
into the frozen nacre of street,

into the cubic alleyways,
rain smiles light as *****.
But moments don't hold,
something turns off -

the clouds are burning alive
in a songbird's oubliette.
The bastille falls
all the prisoners escape.

The life and
death of it -
Four thousand
years of relics
confront me as
memento mori:
glazed plate,
wine cup,
& garland of
jasmine blossoms.
Every hand
that knew
these is dust.

But in another
breath I'm in
my head, where
you are an
archaeologist,
recovering each
of these priceless
things: from under
far hill, in a copse
shaped like an "X,"
in meadows that
seem innocent,
but dig and gold
shines the eye.

Bronze after bronze
after bronze -
all yours. It's so easy
to see how this could
have been you -
hunting history
down to the bones.

Astrolabe,
book of jade,
turquoise drake
curling and curling.
They are all two
things at once:

They speak
the mortal voice
directly to my
deepest ear.
They are also
symbols of a
version of you
I see so easily -
in love with
the past, eager to
find it, wherever it
might be, unearth it
& swallow it whole.

My cubist
face looks out
the window at a
moon wrestling
sinuous blackish
clouds that fling
welting scales of
rain in little belts.

My face enjambs
like these lines,
& I catch sight of
the cloud basin
climbing higher
& higher into
the upper champagne
of the atmosphere,
clouds the same
shade as dull teeth
in a wet mouth.

The angles of
my jaw -
cameras fail
to distill it.
Or I am so full
of wild will
that no one
notices my face
is a trompe l'oeil.
In this pale light
I'm all cheek
and brow-
another bottle
of wine and I
can smear my
own memory of it.  

The clouds
I mentioned, they
fell one by one
into the Anacostia
river, never to be
seen again.

My hands of old snow
are pulling down drafts
of brick-blooded sloe.

The TV's glass glow
is hard as a haft
in my hands of old snow.

Night thick as a dough,
bleeding moon like a shaft
of brick-blooded sloe.

Slip the man what I owe
in black dollars that laughed
in my hands of old snow.

Face bright from the blow,
a drunkard's witchcraft
of brick-blooded sloe.

This tired old show
again autographed
with hands of old snow,
of brick-blooded sloe.

My hand thinks
of your hand
when the little mirrors
in the street
are broken by
bibs of rain,
& when the white
box clouds
billow to a steam
cuff horizon  
& when the gray collars
of smoke
stand from
sinuous chimneys
over starched
winged elms -
& when we talk and
compare notes
in the lonely ceremonies
of the afternoon.

i.
Your names
are a sudden
throb on
the tongue.

ii.
Your names
are a beachhead,
and the splitting
tide across it.

iii.
Your names
are diaries,
secret days
of ash and ink.

iv.
Your names
are the green
vocabularies
of the branches.

v.
Your names
are a shock
of gin in the
back of the throat.

vi.
Your names
are vespertine,
a soft song
in the evening.

vii.
Your names
are a corsage
of ether around
the wrist.

viii.
Your names
are an antidote
to the long,
long day.

ix.
Your names
are dreams,
mirages that
divide and rise.

x.
Your names
are the dark
brick fork
in my lane.

The earth moves
according to its natural principles -
I love you according to mine.

Youth has left us so quickly -
the sun was once
a sweet saffron bolus
we swallowed so eagerly
fat day after day.

Now it's a quiet yellow *****,
that chokes on its own easting and
goes down like a horse pill in the west.

Instead, we are with moon -
I pull you close sometimes in tide,
then you're away waning, waning -
doldrums, tantrums.

If only I could swing low over you,
in your green rain town,
& not be pushed away.

It's no longer easy
to share the days with you.
I fill with ulcers
that bleed all into me,
the body the echo of the mind.

But I love you on natural principles -
you have touched my life all over.
Where I go, I bring you;
you are still the voyage home,
even when your replies come
so terse and lacking invitation.

Youth

A scent like a sword forged with the acid
of plums found by a road,
the sugary kisses that linger in the teeth,
the drops of life sprinkling on the fingertips,
the sweet ****** heart,
the yards, the haystacks, the inviting
secret rooms in the vast houses,
mattresses sleeping in the past, the raging green valley
seen from above, from a hidden window:
adolescence all flickering and burning
like a lamp knocked over in the rain.

-Pablo Neruda,
translated by Evan Stephens ~1999

O rebel angel in the whitest shirt,
with a smile's arrow in a quiver of air,
I'll down this whisky now and flirt:
blotted, besotted, bleary, bared.
After rugby cup the talk converts
to banana slugs and wine-sea hares,
& when you exit to a silvered next
I don't wait at all to ask about you.
Our hosts' reply, uncanny quick as a hex,
etched in glassy-cheeked tattoo:
I already know I'll send a text.
I leave and ease a dream, the eaves askew...
Now dawn jitters in on dewy, burnished feet,
swinging over sleepy skirt of new-born street.

Cherry florets
volley the branch-ends
in a new rain -
the attention of this world
seems endlessly divided
as I patrol envies of holly
and hyacinth, hands full
of Thursday.
You call me,
your hair grown long,
we chat a check-up
over your pasta.
Out the bearded window
infant blossoms crack out
into the wet drifts -
forgive me,
I am so bad at goodbyes.

Coifs of lightning disentangle
under a black cloud lattice.

Thunder rustles to rude growl,
bracelets of leaf are trembling.

We're eastbound, hundreds of us
on this loosened buckle

of corrugated silver flash.
The rain attacks the window

in excoriating scrawls
slivering down into a sluice.

Red-shirted woman, run now,
over the yawning pool

that shivers with addition.
Blue-breasted runner, fly,

fly into clay-colored false dusk
that heaves with humid breath.

Escape from this wet hunger
that walks over us so indifferently.

We stumble nightward. Rain laces
our eyes shut. We're alone here.

Cold rain,
& silver fork.

The date
moved from
winter night
to a gallery
where it
paused and
other things
moved
beneath the
Tigermilk.

Dazed,
I lost more
than heart
& the next
day the stress
carried me
on steel wing
to shed blood.

But I was clear.
Maybe things
were reset a little,
or maybe
I worried too much

because this
new thing
was already
spreading
across the inside
of my skin.

Oma watching
television downstairs,
while blue room sheets
squared back in peels,
& honeysuckle's ladder
up the brickwork
reached like spring fingers
towards my window,
where in brown shadows
I saw foxes steal over
the crumbling drive,
& clouds crashed trees
atop deer eating lawn
where uncle's autos coruscated
in the tall wilds.
In that bed I came of age
with thoughts of women naked -
New candles ached
and led the way deeper
as they dripped
all across my adolescence.
Years bloomed inside me,
stones fell from the sky,
hard as ***; fox bones
slept in the wood,
the televisions all sat,
idols on the lace,
flickering presses
that touched every wall.
The moon a wet thigh -
something sang,
& burrowed beneath the pillow.

Bruisy clouds slouch across a grayed glower
on a brisk, anesthetized Tuesday.

All these people, coming and going on the walk,
ignoring the sobs of the frayed man who digs

squelched cigarette butts out of the mulch
packing the dead-headed elm at the bus stop.

I cook a small lunch that threads the studio
with citrus fingers, above the coal painting

that dries flat on the Sicilian game table,
but my mind is elsewhere. I am thousands

of miles from this bricked-in niche where scotch
and stout stand sentinel on the granite bar:

I am walking step by step through Lansdowne,
past the silent salt-nose of each slate-slanted house,

on my way to the sand where the power plant
reaches upward with muscled black arms

so that even the froth withdraws into a curtain
of coming rain... strange, always a gray rain,

that comes so quickly. It heavies the sweater
of the yellowed dog-walker, steadies the rasp

of the cigarette digger, peppers the mirror
that spreads its silver shell across the asphalt.

This littling rain calls me back from Sandymount
and its endless bench. The black paint is dry now,

& the old year has died, flung to the floor like a rag
you cough into when you breathe the wrong way.

This opening world
is full of visible breath
curling over the blood house.
     I'm not in love anymore.

The air is crisp as bitters,
as spackled mud freezes
into rutted battlements.
     No, you haven't been.

Winter is a spill of grass
laced with sleet,
a quiet rind of snow.
     How long have you known?

A brittle red cloud
of sloey ice scatters
from a ginning curve.
     We should stop talking.

Domed salt vaults
rise by the highway
like a black dough.
     We can't keep doing this.

Drink winter down;
envelopes of night
are rapidly sealing.
     It's over, over.

****** wine-light crawls
the window ledge in Chelsea.
From our hotel room we can see
a blond wig fall to the floor
in an orange room across West 28th.
Out on the street, brown beer stains
spread across the peculiar night cloth.

People who can forget can let go;
the rest of us will remember
the way the moon rolled over
the highrises in Little Italy
by Gelso and Grand,
& got stuck in her eye;
I died more than a little.

Flowers that blossom at night:
those who open in the dark,
those who open to the dark.

I sit in my ***-bottomed boat,
thinking about the turns
& branches of my life.

No: my boat is dry-docked.
Let's be honest:
it's just a lonely bed, no oars.

But I am open, at last:
I am ready for someone
to come and turn their key

in this reddened lock.
Behind this door are rewards.
Behind this door I am waiting.

But let's be still more honest:
no one is racing down the hall
with a key in hand to try their luck.

I am a night-blooming cereus:
open in the dark, scented,
waiting for something in the black

to land and spread pollen.
I will breathe it - I will inhale
the sweetness, the gesture...

The mulberry tree is night-ripe,
its fruit fermenting almost before dripping
down the branch to the gray-saddled sidewalk,
where birds refuse it; the sharpened tang
slips and spreads into the green closeness.
Char-wings spread out above me,
interrupted by static bursts of cloud
that stream from a southern vagueness;
the waxed crescent moon-blossom
spits a little of its milkish shine
towards me in the black heat.
The lance-lights of the streetlamps
snap on, lidless and yellowed,
venting that yellow down
into the wet cut yards.
Everything is quiet, empty;
in a cardboard box by my side
is her sketchbook, our locket,
her old phone. I look through the glass
at the blue cape that drapes
the sandy castle across the street,
watching as sleep comes for me,
mincing through hillside pines.

As a child I'd run
slashing through lawn,
a green noose drawn
under butter sun.
I remember eating
belladonna at six,
black berries picked
under fence's fleeting
shadow by the square
of grass. I ate a pair,
and didn't go mad
more than I had
been. No one knew -
except now you.

Mehmet II burns
in my hand
while we hunt
the Perseid shower
under a waxing
gibbous moon's white
sea broadcast.
Prosecco disappears
inside us. You pick
deck tomatoes, and
conversation gets
interesting by your knee.

The night doesn't end
so much as folds and
folds again, with us
by the very center.
Sinuous silk birds
crease into sheets
just beyond your
delectable ear.
Your breath
a dark ribbon,
a flower of steam,
a door I step through
on my way to the
kingdom of hands.

Night glass
full of froth,
the one-arm
scissor's voice,
a balestra
of cold idea,
a zugzwang
where I must
speak, I must,
but every word
will haunt me,
like the faces
of vapor that rise
at dawn from
the lawn.

The stars are
dying up there,
as the brute
sun rises again
& they fade
to zero
in the blue.  
I have such
terrible flurries
of thought
at night,
everything is
crushing, but
inevitably the black
gives way to indigo,
then a delicate purple,
then to bright cobalt.
Things are better
under the opening
sun and its
tanning wing.

The devil sits
beside me,
feeding me his
melting whispers
dense as biscuits
full as the head
of the tree.
I can only banish
him back to his
bottle with the
piano, writing
songs in D minor,
letting the paint
listen as the hands
are moving,
weaving spells.

Finally, order
in my mind -
these doubts
will pass from history -
evanescence.
Other worries fall
like rippling castles.
I wake up too early
but there you are.
Things seem ok
in the deep deep
blue of morning,
stars hanging dead
in the sky as the
carving sun toasts
away the dew,
and doubts fade
back to zero.

The gaps go all quiet -
the Monday girl
glides brown cloud
down and away
while I walk winter rooms,
looking for a handhold.
Depression fills the mouth.
A whole childhood of rain
slants to snow.

Night wedding
on the
mountainside,
flights of tuxedos
in the grass shadow.

I'm watching
from the moss mane
that coils
the monadnock.
Slopes of music
spill against
the tarnishing
puck of moon.

But weddings cease
to move in me,
even now,
seven months
before the divorce.

Gaze out
instead on
the rockfall
where we
backpacked in
cottonmouth July.

Is there an
emptiness
in me?

I sit apart,
dress shoes
shine in
the moon switch,
mountain
a long strum,
the forest
is phthalo.

I melt
down my past
and recast it
into something
better.
Because maybe
the moon
is just
a cinder
crumble.

Maybe the
low-footed mountain
just some angles
in brown.

Maybe all
the deep green
woods are
just trees,
some trees.

Honeycombs of light
****** themselves into being
in metro fields.
Children cross the lush
to skip stones at the dead fence
as night assembles itself
into spaces and stars.

Day falls away like a skin,
beneath conquering belts of milk
that separate from a lidless emptiness.
Silver subway trains gleam
in their charcoal tunnels.
Apart from all of it
is a chalk morsel moon.

Sometimes you are
the thrown stone
sinking down to post
& sometimes you are
the star wheeling off tether.

Oksana said
"Love is not linear,"
and she was right.
It rises and it dips,
O how it dips...

Ebb and recede,
the quiet moments
vanish between
stars, doubt settles
in the ribs, thoughts
drift and drift away.

But trust in me:
anxiety and sorrow
cannot shake me
from your side;
just as I lean
to you in my own
times of worry.

The ocean
divides
& divides
between us,
the water
never
content with
the shape
of itself.

Thoughts
divide
& divide
within me,
patterns
of distance
with you
at the center.

Stout gulls shriek out
divorcing moments
as highways sag,
knocking margarita lights
one into the next.
Checkout is Sunday morning,
lobby as vacant as on arrival -
sign the check,
go through the motions.

A bared sun tops
a chilly world,
last call's red
trees, yesterday's

rain, this shallow
scrape of hours
that pulls apart,
raw, gin-dipped,

a moon waxing over
the rose bush. This
is our ritual now,  
the breezy screen

of moments that hides
what is really felt.
Speaking your fear
makes it real. The rest

of it is all hard, too
Better to let silence
climb and fall. It's cruel,
those leaves.

L-,

It's a lonely acid evening,
citric-salted, hung like a skin

on headlights that rise
& split into orange antlers.

A woman screams "Barry!"
into the alley, over and over,

until night climbs over her
with black, grinding knees.

Sweet Saturday carvings
are Sunday's rack and bone:

after your lobby debut
(your eyes fine as sea-thread)

you spun away, you are still spinning.
The heart's ever-after is knotted:

I thin you with gin, smear
that clever flash of teeth and lip

into the cold hollows of air
that clot the mid-month.

Listen: the alley woman
gave up on Barry.

Yours,
E-

I read today about a cat in Texas
who was found screaming

& blind, face signed with blood,
rescued under a sun that crawled

through eyelids: flitting, slitted rays.
Small, anguished emblem:

stretched outside the manse,
abandoned by mother and father,

stray, stitched to solitude,
straining to understand.

We are as you were.
O little cat, sweet-armed giants

resolved your misery.
Go chase your little whorls

even as this scant planet
whisks through galaxies

steered by obscured titans.
Behold, friend:

your joys slice at the silence
that once ate afternoons.

"The eye
functions
as the
brain's
sentry,"

but my
off-duty
eye is
welling
with
hyssop.

Dark
Sicilian
coffee
pigment
circles
my iris
for you,
around
& around.

My eye
sees your
words,
floating
like crosses
of hyacinth,
a campaign
of brightness.

And
your eye,
sweet
spark,
it twinkles
with fields
sown
with
music.
Hazel
star,
wait for
a head
of sun
& *****
into green -
your eyes
of spring.

Soon,
my eyes
will see
you walking
from the
gate,
and they
will riot
with shining
orchestras
of brown,
& whites
pure as
yachts.

The looks
they send
you build
cities in
the air.

My voice
enters
the air
as I speak
to her,
delves
there
in purrs
of wind.

If I am
silent,
and she
is sleeping,
the air
stutters
a little
as it speaks
its own name.

In the
language
that sails
the lung,
it whispers
about her.

In the
night,
the air
grasps
at cigarette
smoke
with
fingers
small
as a
hush.

It lurches
toward
the branch
of moon.
My father's
grave
is hidden
in the air.

The air,
the air
hangs
between us,
lithe and
endless,
almost
invisible.

When she
pauses for
breath,
the air
offers itself
in sweet
bursts.

In mist
and fog,
it learns
to kiss.

When she
speaks,
the air
is filigree,
like the
small laces
of a tree
in bloom.

Silver-sided rattle,
a humble streak climbing
the hill in small doses.
Blue teardrop seats,
steel and yellow poles,
broad-eyed windows that offer
the view of things that the subway
will never give.

I've seen fistfights,
a baby born, overdoses,
old women falling asleep,
old men screaming wordlessly,
junkies scrambling for pills
dropped underfoot,
tourists grappling with the geometry
of this unknown language,
all of it.

Vibrating with a menacing stumble,
it attracts everyone. It promises
a view and a destination.
It's better to go through the world
than to sink below it.

All the missed opportunities,
the collapsed, balled-up destinies
entwined with small scotch:
the heart misses a beat

when WhatsApp chimes in:
a message from A-----,
who got the wheel moving.
She's had a baby in Dublin,

but is looking to move back stateside.
The whole year waves violently
as it drowns in a Glencairn.
The clouds are fried on a rain griddle,

grease-dark, the outer bands
of the hurricane carcass.
A catalog of dresses sails on down
the long cement string, oblivious.

My little cat sleeps on the red rug,
& my old friend reads the legions
while I pluck at the silver tomb-pall
of my two day shirt.

Turn on the dread lamps,
let the bitter day escape into the vents
of the cyanotic eve - another fell day
chokes itself black into the withered ether.