And the leaves alight,
One by one by one
Float, dance, twirl, in the sun
A bright and beautiful end
To a season well begun!

My father left me
when I was four.
After that, I saw him
on weekends,
& discovered he filled
his coffee cups with bourbon
& sipped it all morning,
taming the demon day
while I watched the early shows,
                             insensate.

Now Dad is gone.
I am past forty.
The woman I thought I would love
long into the purple evening
has left me.
I fill my cups with Scotch
in the early mornings,
fail at meditation,
sip away the dead days,
the dead days.

O little cloud,
where have you gone?
You sink to wisp or worse.
Your grayness turns bone-white,
then a cancerous blue
until you are nothing -
no, you are nothing now.
Your grave is the air
that I breathe.

I sharply decline with you;
you, up in your vault,
waiting for the densities
that will crease you into rain,
I in my mug-clutter,
my liquor-ploughed
library of ills,
try to cope,
come to grips.

Little cloud,
you died a long time ago.
You were reborn,
& died again. You've died
so many wet deaths.
I understand.
This is no world
to live in more
than a day or two.

It is six fifteen in the morning
when you call me,
worried that I'm not well.

I hold you in a little tired slice
of choke-glass blooming
in an smear-eyed hand -

I face you with all my blotches,
try to splint the break,
to be where you are.  

Maybe you're right -  
your love undoes me.
The hours are pauses, aches,

each more or less intolerable.
If my heart slumps away
one of these smoked spring nights,

an unbeating gore-stump,
carry me back to Dublin
& spread my ash-seed

in Iveagh Gardens,
where I carelessly left a dream
among the cane apple husks.

Drink whisky
& recite one of the hundreds
of poems I sent you

to the water-ruined statue
near the rose cage;
maybe someday you'll be curious,

and find the ones I never sent,
filled with sorrow's rennet,
sour-salted, reeking of rain,

retch-cairns
to the halved honeycomb-husk
it seemed like we were becoming.

So of course I both live and die
when your ****** chime
breaks my false, papery day:

I love you above all things,
even now, when you turn half away -  
I don't think you will turn back -

but are you really done here?
Are the white lilies really dead
in the bleachy vase?

This is not what I wanted -
the black wing, a door closing -  
I am living the wrong life.