We don’t dance here anymore.

We balance on wobbly stools
and order PBRs with whiskey backs,
sidestepping the looks we tend to give
each other in the mirror behind the bar.

Tonight is Christmas Eve again.
Again, tonight is Christmas Eve.

Reflected in a frosted window
framed by multicolored lights,
our waitress wears a miniskirt
and candy cane-striped tights.

Her laugh rings like the silver
bell of tomorrow’s hangover.

We are not the ones racking
another game of eight-ball
or feeding the jukebox or
tossing darts at the wall.

That’s not us, the hipster couple
exchanging sardonic repartee,
clever tattoos comingling as
they trade kisses in the corner.

Could that ever have been us?

Here is where we *****
it up and tamp it down.

Here is where we wait
for our future to finish
its careful unwrapping.

Here is where we say
thank you and drown,

tangled together in
ribbons of twilight.

Some nights it
is alarmingly
imperceptible:
an exoskeleton ascends
on iron rivets and steel;
unseen scaffolding tapers
to a steady pulsing point
of phosphorescence—
a mechanical heart
circulating red light
into leaden clouds.

Some nights the air thickens
with cordite, grief, and snow.

Tonight with winter here
we can see the tower’s
beacon blinking through
a tangled scrim of trees
half a mile across town,
and yet even with our
bodies squeezed together
like radio dials in the dark
we are unable to tune it in—
the signal that would calibrate
our estranged transistor hearts.

When I was seventeen
I did a dangerous thing:

Rung by rung, I rose
into forbidden space,
climbing as an insect
would along a slender
blade of wiregrass.

At the top of the tower
I settled into thin stratus.

I took in my home town,
insignificant and benign:
car headlights sliding
on roads to park below
neon drugstore signs,
yellow house windows
and amber streetlights—
whole neighborhoods
stretched out like fields
lit by electric flowers.

I’m sure I saw the glowing
orange tip of the cigarette
my girlfriend was smoking,
rocking herself away from me
on her metal front porch swing.

While I cowered
there in that aerie,
the air reeked of rain,
smoke, and despair.
I remember my heart,
syncopated and suffering;
how it pulsed beneath
a scaffolding of bones—
a buried, burning flare.

Our road trip memories align
as we pass a Farmall tractor,
fire engine red and rooted
roadside in a field of alfalfa,
a relic washed by cloudburst,
a workhorse dried in sunshine,
arrested air stack,
rusted crank case,
supple spider webs
in chaste wheel wells—
immutable old machine
somehow extinguishing
in the reflected acreage
of the rear view mirror.

Tonight the ceiling fan
clicks with every turn.

The bedside clock ticks
and tocks in moonglow.

I close my eyes
and one by one
the light bulbs in
the house explode.

The darkness
becomes me,
I think.

I wear it silky black,
a spider-tailored suit
imponderous as ether.

I focus on the anesthetic sound
of a future breathing inside me.

Memory folds like
an obsolete map—

a distant archipelago
of diminishing stars.

Years ago, I’m sure,
we married in a copse
blue with wild hyacinth.

Tonight the satellites
cut like diamond tips,

lugubrious orbits etching
across a bedroom window.

Dawn always blooms with
the sound of breaking glass.

Stalled in afternoon traffic
by the crack of a jackhammer
and the smell of hot asphalt,
what else is there to do but wait
for the sun-kissed woman
in muddy work boots and
orange vest to acknowledge me.

She has a tattoo of an AR-15
on her left forearm and more
ink (an octopus?) under her eye.

She is in total control.

Her unclasped safety
vest ***** in the wind.
The smoke from her
Marlboro Red snakes
down the line of cars
and wafts into my open
window with a smell
so strong she should
be riding shotgun.

She alone will deliver me.

As the jackhammer
fires on full auto,
I wait like a child
for my turn to go.

Her eyes squint and the octopus
squirms and my afternoon restarts
with another twist of her gloved hand,
the sign revolving from Stop to Slow.

I had to learn what the word
contiguous meant when I was 26.
We hit all 48 states in nine months,
driving the Ford Ranger in a figure-eight
from East Coast to West and across the Plains.
We stopped midway to work in Salt Lake City.
She bused tables at Little America. I did landscaping.
At night, bodies squeezed together in the bed of the pickup,
America expanded around us, a sweet smell of syrup and gasoline.

Do you see me?

I’ve been devouring poetry,
by the line,
by the page,
by the book.
No poem has been overlooked.

I’ve been feasting
on free verse,
blank verse,
perverse
cascades
of stanzas and rhymes,
a banquet of words
on which to dine.

I’ve been swallowing ad nauseam,
scarfing down similes,
masticating metaphors,
gormandizing poems aplenty.

Rhyming couplets,
I’ve contained them.
Sonnets and epics,
ingested.
Lyrical odes,
digested.
A thousand lines
to make you swoon.
I’ve tasted them all—
the potent and
the picayune.
Villanelles, check.
Sestinas too.
I even hiccupped
my own haiku:

          Icicles melt on glazed gutters.
          Water drips, prolific, bits of sunlit seeds
          promising lilacs below the eaves.

Do you see me*?

I hate to ask, but I’m afraid
something poetic has happened.

my head is a tureen
brimming with stars
my arms are utensils
in a darkened drawer
my chest, a room of last resort
my feet are stressed, in short

Such prosody is blinding.

Can you tell me why
my eyes are bleak?
Or why I no longer
blink?

I sense the sear of fluent tears
composing on my cheek:
endless drops, black beads,
consumptive stains of ink.

My grandfather was not a boxer
but he loved to fight, throwing
punches at the faces of hard men,
left and right hooks, uppercuts
in barroom brawls and alleyways,
with hands the size of iron trivets,
forearms cut with ropes of muscle.

Eventually, after decades of stitches
and bruised knuckles, after his hair
turned white and his eyes clouded,
he would shadowbox in the garden
behind the dilapidated potting shed,
swinging slower, less light on his feet,
but safe in that manicured square
ringed by boxwoods and evergreens,
the bees in spring buzzing applause.

My grandmother would watch
him from the kitchen window,
in a sweater she always wore
regardless of the weather,
and wonder what he was fighting
against, or, perhaps, fighting for.

And that’s how my grandfather died:
throwing a final right cross in the air
before dropping to his knees at last,
knocked out on a mat of green grass,
washed by an unexpected downpour,
water collecting in opened red tulips,
loving cups in full bloom, the first
ten drops of rain counting him out.

Standing in that garden decades later,
I know I am no fighter.
Approaching old age, hands in pockets,
I watch for signs of unexpected weather,
worry about things beyond my control:
car crashes, cancer, electromagnetic pulses,
the minutiae of a thousand apocalypses.

Is the future drawing back
a left hook I will never see
coming? Will a haymaker
hit me like a hammer,
unmaking my family
before the final bell?

And suddenly I realize:
maybe I should have
learned to throw
a ******* punch.

Two days
from now
you won’t remember
how I laid you down
delirious,
my six-year-old
daughter
swooning

spoonfuls
of purple
medicine
sickly sweet

your body burning
up beneath
pink sheets
you kicked
to the foot
of the bed

I swear
you were
dreaming
of mermaids
saddled on pink dolphins
like bejeweled rodeo stars
mermaids
swimming closer
mermaids
with long yellow hair
bucking waves—
sea girls with
one hand raised
in salty air,
orbiting
in circles
overhead,
wee galaxies
of ocean mist,
droplets
of sweat
on your lips.

At dawn
your fever
broke with
the sweetness
of candy glass
mason jars;
fireflies
escaping
as embers,
a dimming
delirium
of stars.

Two days
from now
you won’t remember
how I came to you
in the middle
of the night
when you cried
out for me,
your voice
unfamiliar—
a song sung
by a small girl
burning up
beneath
the sea.

I

She’s sleepwalking again,
my nine-year-old daughter,
who shares the bedroom
with her sister down the hall.
She’s kicked off the covers
and wandered downstairs,
somnambulant, her bare feet
moving as though in a dream
across the kitchen’s linoleum
floor to the back of the house.
The porch door smacks shut—
a gunshot—and she is gone.

For a time, I watch her from
the open bedroom window.
Her diaphanous nightgown
absorbs August moonlight.
She steps slowly, a pale flame
floating across the back field,
the wiregrass up to her knees,
avoiding a copse of redbuds,
skirting shrubs and stones.

When her small figure succumbs
to shadow at the edge of the trees,
I put on my bathrobe and follow.

II

At first, she is lost to me.
I break into a delirious run,
scratched on my cheek
by a redbud branch.
Reaching the tree line,
I see her standing still,
shoulders stooped,
a luminous cattail
bending down.

She hovers above a sleeping fawn,
the warm bundle curled at her feet.
I contemplate the white spots
scattered on fur, thinking, velvet stars.

But when I place a hand
on my daughter’s shoulder
I see blood flowing fresh
from the doe’s abdomen;
red entrails slipping out,
pooling on pine needles.
Stepping closer, I remember a moment
earlier that evening: a jar of preserves
spilled carelessly on the kitchen’s stone counter,
the soft dishtowel soaking scarlet in my hand.

At the edge of the creek, a second doe
watches us with opaque, joyless eyes.
My daughter puts her finger to her lips;
the doe tenses, blinks, and bolts away.

I lift my daughter and carry her carefully
home, her head buried in my shoulder,
blades of grass clinging to my bare feet.

III

My daughters' room:
holding her in weak arms, poised
to lay her on top bedcovers,
I notice her sister’s empty bed,
neatly made, the blankets smooth
and tight across the mattress.

An anemic moth bangs
against the window pane.

The light flicks on and suddenly
I am awake, remembering all of it:
the dry diagnosis, the slow whir
of hospital machines, the smell
of old flowers, and somewhere
in my daughter’s stomach,
the cruel mathematics
of cells metastasizing.

My wife stands in the doorway,
her hand on the light switch.
My arms are empty. I gaze
down and see our daughter
nestled under covers,
breathing softly, asleep.

I see the pale white skin of my clean bare feet.

You’re sleepwalking again, my wife says.
She touches my unsullied cheek, hooks her
fingers through mine, and shuffles me down
the hall to bed. Head sinking into the pillow,
I gaze out the open bedroom window and weep.

The moonless sky cradles its constellations:
bright grains of salt scattered on soapstone;
my hand trembles, unable to wipe them away.

Transmogrified
by winter squalls,
the branches of the sycamore
have ossified into a cathedral
of snow.

A red cardinal alights
there—a spot of blood,
a feathered clot of sin.

Hush. Listen to the limbs
where he has perched:

the nascent cracking
of winter’s church.

Evening docks
like a desolate ship,
indigo and monolithic,

its umbral sails
swelling above
the distant hips of
a titanic continent.

Sleep tastes like a mossy anchor;
it lurches, shifts, and slips into gear—
the sound of stars grinding on stars.

I sail across an ocean of teeth.

I acquiesce. I drown

in the velvet
whirlpool of
your absence.

The spiders of sleep
are weaving words
in the back of her throat.

I listen to the sibilant
murmur of her dreams

unfurling.

She recites non sequiturs
to darkened walls, her bed

a stage draped in velvet
curtains of disassociation.

Incessant spinners,
spiders embroider

forsaken moonlight
into feathery pillow talk.

I am an audience of one.

When her monologue
is done, I blanket the bed sheets
with bouquets of bloodless roses.

Ashamed, I wait for more.

Her dreams scratch
at the face of the moon,
inscribing an encore.

Picture my younger brother,
age nine, supine, sprawled
on the kitchen counter after
that aluminum baseball bat
cracked the top of his head,
while our mother, former ER nurse,
sutured the wound with black thread,
my sister and I pinning his arms
and legs down ******* the Formica
to keep him from writhing away.

I saw my brother yesterday,
now bigger and taller than me,
hair thinning faster than mine,
and upon catching sight of the
white crescent scar, remembered
my mother’s steady hand,
red with blood, stitching skin to skin,
sewing together two moments in time.

In theory the moon
is a terrible dancer.

But tonight, waltzing
alone in an open field

I feel her graces
on my shoulder,

her moon rhythms
measuring time
against my neck,

a delicate crater punched
into the small of my back.

She has never
been this close

to me

so I am unashamed
to be dancing with her

like this

for the first time,
a solitary partner

casting shadows
on frosted grass,

spinning over furrows,
long scarf precariously

close to my clomping boots
keeping three-quarter time,

pausing only when she
whispers the word lunatic

in my ear,

a bewitching farm girl
flirting
from her stratosphere
far away.

You sink in despair
but will soon float because of
the fear you displace.

Confining myself to laconic musings,
peregrinations of a decimated lexicon.

In her dreams, the docent
maneuvers schoolchildren

down museum corridors,
shepherding their bodies

into evacuated galleries
where nothing changes

except the patterns
of nails hammered
into plaster walls.

She speaks pedantic
falsehoods until one

by one the children
disengage and find

themselves a constellation
of nails upon which to hang.

A renaissance takes time, but
not as much as you might think.

Come midnight,
the museum is full
of masterpieces.

And though the works
of art make her weep,

the docent is inspired
to study each small frame
for a brushstroke

that might signify
the break of dawn.

When it is done
you will be dead
so let me tell you
what comes next:

The executioner,
a connoisseur of
wine and dread,
returns to his hole
behind the gallows
and uncorks a bottle
of Châteauneuf-du-Pape,
forgetting all about
his heavy black hood,
which he removes
with a hollow laugh
and leaves hanging
by the unlocked door.

He drinks the bottle down
until all that remains
is a another red stain
on the wooden table,
a circle interlocking
other circles—
Venn diagrams
with nothing
but nothing
in common.

Come morning
he’ll cut your body
loose and listen
to your future:
the sound of wind
threading an
empty noose.

Laugh if you want;
lately my dreams
are all the same:

black and white and silent,
a montage of mute scenes
in which he quietly appears,

a funny little man beset
by brute absurdities, framed
by a toothbrush mustache,

bowler hat, and vagabond suit—
dressed for hapless caricature,
a disheveled angel in disguise.

He forever waddles away from me
down a lane of denuded trees,
jauntily twirling his bamboo cane,

his gray pocket watch stopped—
a cheap prop at the end of a chain.
Watch how the last scene transpires:

I stay in my cushioned seat
expecting house lights to rise.
Alone in the dead theater,

I wait for the live orchestra
to offer an accompaniment,
to set the silver screen on fire.

So the Violets lived
in the long shadow
of a slaughterhouse,

separated from death
by cyclone fencing
and a scrabbly yard.

In summer, family time
meant sitting on the porch
drinking cans of Budweiser.

It took about a six pack
each to mask the smell
of cow and diesel fuel,

but the rumble of semis
and the relentless lowing
of cattle were inescapable.

In winter, woodsmoke
filled the small rooms,
slowly turning the walls

the color of ***** snow.
Icicles hung from gutters,
lengthening like knives.

The youngest Violet daughter
grew up, moved to Louisville,
and became a painter of vivid

abstracts.

I have one of her paintings
hanging on a wide white wall.
I like to pour myself a Scotch

and watch the mangled colors—
brilliant viscera sullying
a slaughterhouse stall—

the smell of peat and smoke;
the taste of earth’s undoing.

I
Among ten thousand trees,
the transformation begins
with the blink of a snowbird.

II
Snowbirds live.
Snowbirds die.
Wing tips span
the seam between
egg and bone.

III
I baked my snowbird
in a pie; the oven wanted
something beautiful to eat.

IV
A nest is a clever home.
At night, house windows
shine like yellow puzzles
for the snowbird to solve.

V
I steal the notes
of the snowbird’s song,
shackle myself to the silence
that blooms between the notes.

VI
Abandoned women
in thrift store robes,
abandoned houses
warmed by bedroom fires—
the snowbird understands.

VII
The mouth of a snowbird
is small but mellifluous.

VIII
Children with dusty fingers
color sidewalks with chalk.
Snowbirds alight there and dip
their wings into an apocalyptic sun.

IX
When the snowbird departs,
the branches of the juniper
languish like bitter crescents of lime,
ice cubes melting in a glass of gin.

X
To decipher snowy syntax,
etch lines on a sheet of ice;
get on all fours and trace
snowbird tracks in snow.

XI
Rain is turning to sleet.
The snowbird is awake.

XII
She crosses her legs
on the velvet settee,
exhaling cigarette smoke
in rings across the room.
The ashtray is a crystal grave
of severed snowbird beaks.

XIII
It was winter all afternoon. Across the city,
chimneys are spilling snow into the sky.
A snowbird shivers in the fireplace.
I close my eyes and gather kindling.

Burnt toast and
a spot of blood.

Father dresses for work
and leaves with a wave,
his gabardine suit
the exact same shade
as the storm cloud blooming
on the back of his left hand.

After breakfast, mother pins
his undershirts to the wash line,
clothespins clenched
between broken teeth.

From my upstairs window,
I watch his shirts stiffening
in the flinty December air,
a chorus of white flags,
obsequious and clean.

Mother recovers in the laundry room,
where the floor is dusted with feeble
grains of spilled detergent.

I spend the afternoon
preparing for the sound
of tires crunching on gravel,
for the sweep of headlights
across the lawn.

There are plans
and maneuvers
to arrange.

Counterattacks.

Even now, the snow
on the side of the road

has turned to the color
of my childhood.

In the late night light
of the bedroom lamp

you watch me watch you
undo your favorite dress;

you don’t stop until
the garnet necklace

around your neck
is the only thing

left in the world for me
to touch that is not you.

Before kids we drove
a blue Chevy Corvair.
No seat belts (of course),

so you could slide next
to me in the bench seat.
We rolled the windows

down to escape the gas fumes
and the staggering smell of oil.
But oh the sound of the engine

roaring behind us in the trunk
as we accelerated close together,
the streetlights all turning green.

We leaned into loose curves,
navigating to the straightaway
where we would open up and fly

like lovers from some Springsteen
song until the road became nothing
and the car disappeared and it was

just you and me hurtling to this place,
suspended by our own combustion,
carried by time, married by velocity.

You already have my heart.
And though I’m not dapper

enough to wear one, my body
is yours at the drop of a hat.

My mind, too, belongs to you:
before you even read them,

these lines are yours to open.
Slide a finger beneath the seam;

undo me with a concupiscent flick.
Spill me onto the bed. Take me in.

You’ve read me before.
Tonight, read me closer.

You hold my hand
like a cartographer;
latitude and longitude,
coordinates of our life,
discrete geographies
mapped together—
discrete geographies,
coordinates of our life,
latitude and longitude:
like a cartographer
you hold my hand.

I am no artist, but
were I to sketch
the hydrangea dying
on the dining room table,
I would want to capture
how the room just brightened,
sunlight filling the windows,
illuminating the flowers
as they move without
moving even closer
to a final decomposing.

My father a medic in Vietnam
for many years refused to wear
his wedding ring because he said
of countless times he had to handle

the aftermath of soldiers jumping
out of helicopters at the exact
moment their wedding rings caught
on protruding bolts or couplings,

leaving their fingers and rings
aboard Hueys while they fell
caterwauling in air below crimson
contrails dissolving in rotor wash

only to land, godforsaken,
in flooded rice paddies,
shocked and shaken, disjointed
but alive, forever joined in holy
matrimony to far-flung wives.

(after Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening)

The light is everything;
it makes a godly sound

spilling through
the locust grove,

washing over
uncut grass,

negating
shadows,

baptizing husband
and wife in oblivion.

Melancholy blinks
like the black eye
of a whippoorwill.

Who catches the
notes of its song?

Only the dog.

Dusk, patient
as a chrysalis.

They can’t hear
the transmutation
yet, but they will.

The air is warmer
at the river’s edge.

The insects cloud
around your head,

and the white cottage,
the one your wife’s
father built by hand,

seems to be burning
in the afternoon sun.

The hammock strung
between two dogwood
trees twists in the wind.

There should be no shame
in recollecting the songs
she sang when the children

were young and unpredictable,
how they splashed in shallow
water, catching minnows.

Why not close your eyes
and imagine you hear her
calling from the other side?

The slap of a fish jumping
is like a palm to your cheek.

Out there, in the middle of it all,
silver scales flash in clear water—

a contorted shadow swims below,
hooked to impossible brightness.

A close read
reveals that
I am nothing
but a rough draft
riddled with
misspellings—

a work in progress
watered down by
superfluous adjectives,
non sequiturs, and
smothered verbs.

Love is an editor.

She courts me
with a pocket of
sharpened pencils,
blue and red.

She marks me
up meticulously—
dele, stet
dele, stet.

Decades punctuated
by intermittent edits.

Sunlight slanting
through an hourglass.

Her hair as white
as the final page.

When the end comes,
will she love me enough
to give me another pass?

Here I am in the yard again,
shovel in one hand, plastic
bag in the other, trudging
toward the fence in my slippers,
determined to not feel squeamish.

The dog has been scolded
and brought into the house;
she whimpers at the back
window, watching my progress
across a quarter-acre of dormant
grass dusted with morning snow.

Up close, fixed by death,
the squirrel bares its teeth,
white and sharp, its eyes
the size of juniper berries.

I tilt it into the bag,
blood smearing
the rusted shovel,
and turn back, surprised
by the heft of lifelessness,
how dead weight pulls
a broken body down.

Gravity, it occurs to me,
is a relentless undertaker.

I walk and the bag swings
like a soft pendulum
banging against my leg,
counting out my steps,
confounding the dog.

You see, our yards are
nothing but undug graves.

If gravity is our undertaker,
then physics has pocketed
the stars, wearing a funeral
suit blacker than outer space.