A monumental yearning etched upon the sands of her heart.

At night, the sand castle glistens and glimmers as salty tears tease its pillars,

Catharsis is reversed in the moonless night of regrets,

The salt strengthens the foundations of the castle instead.

I.

my sleeping is condensed this spring
such that two or three hours
at most will suffice for one evening.

my body is awake,
yet the wandering back alleys
behind my irises are weary,
and on the cusp of gentrification.

I see faces where there should be none

II.

and I’ve seen the lines again,
though they come far less frequently
than when I had to reach up
to grasp the doorknob.

yet they are as vivid
and bursting with clarity
as the first summer I witnessed them.

they arrive unannounced
single-hair-thick,
rotating on invisible axes,
changing color and length
within equally slim fragments of time
too small to measure in our dimension.

one summer, i recorded how often they visited
but could find no logical frequency to their appearances.

no one has ever known of them but me,
and that woman just picked up a cigarette **** to light her own.

III.

they came again yesterday,
as always, in midafternoon
at 3 o’clock, when christ died.
and i thought, not of him,
but of the time, and how
twelve hours earlier is apparently the devil’s time
a time-piece-turned inverted cross.

IV.

so, I remembered,
how at devils’ time last night,
i was adrift,
sans-sails down brick alleys
thinking not of lines,
of gods or devils and their time,
but of those pan flute notes
and how i can’t wait to hear them again.

This is what it feels like
on the days that feel like
lonely summer nights without you.

I wake groggily to the rays of light
seeping through your cupped hands
that play peek-a-boo with my broken windowsill.
The wind exhales chills down my spine
that inhale me to into the mattress
until midafternoon
when I can finally gasp for a drink.
When I’ve had my fill of toxins,
I can poison people in the hallways of my complex
with venomous small talk that produces
half glazed stare simplicity.
You know the one I’m talking about;
the kind of look that hangs on people
thinking about what to say
while you’re going on about
some nonsense you heard at
some place from
some pretty person.
They have a certain finish over their attention
that doesn’t quite compare to the varnish of your absence.

This is what it feels like
when summer rolls over the hills
like the ongoing thread of my oversized sweaters
on seventy-degree days
because I was always a little too good
at playing hide and seek growing up.

I feel like I get stuck in a loop sometimes.

I heard
somewhere from
some pretty person that
children don’t see scars on adults
because those people
never quite make it past getting their GED,
but here I am as an undergraduate student
mocking what little authority is left over my existence.
At the age of nineteen,
I understand that solitude is the most fulfilling companionship
I will ever browse for,
but I’ll never be able to buy us matching necklaces
at self checkout.

This is what it feels like
to cry in the middle of the day
when you haven’t paid the water bill in two months.
When I put my clothes on,
you aren’t there to watch me leave anymore
and I can’t turn around to grab your neck
and mount you again.
My lips started parting for a cigarette
when I was sixteen
and started parting for you
when I was eighteen
and now they are parting for a finger gun
aimed at the back of my throat after a meal.

I feel like I get stuck in a loop sometimes.

I heard
somewhere from
some pretty person that
I needed to be a size zero
to wrap my legs around you
and still be able to leave some room
for your opposition
when I’ve drank too much whiskey
on a Wednesday night,
but here I am as a size six
and I’m happily tipsy off your rejection
when I’m sober.

This is what it feels like
to exist off of your own
self-destruction.

Each night, indigo blue smoke bloomed from the candle sitting on the patio table while the tall brown-eyed girl spat chewing tobacco into a Styrofoam cup leaning forward with her elbows on the porch railing, watching the black birds pick apart a chicken bone as they teeter tottered across a sable telephone cable. Her name was Candace and she wore a backwards baseball cap, that belonged to her brother Joshua. He had died from a brain aneurysm last year.

She always would tread her fingers around the wide brim of the blue cap, close her eyes and remember how her brother use to take her
to softball practice back when she was in elementary school, driving
her around in his lime green Mitsubishi GT 3000, with the windows down,  and Pink Floyd percolating from the soothing speakers built
into the dashboard. After Joshua had died, Candace dropped out of Mary Washington. She found a job at Movie Theater down the street from the baseball diamond, working at behind the register, arms propped on the countertop, wishing that she had tried out for the club softball team at college. When her shift would end
she’d go back home and sleep in until midafternoon. Then she’d wake up and march over to the library to read the picture books while snuggling  on the lumpy couch with the plump giraffes and short elephants, the toy animals with the holes on the bottom of
their rear ends where the stuffing would roll out whenever she’d squeeze their heads.

One rainy day she strolled to the lake and stole a rowboat from the wooden dock. Dipping the plastic oar into the calm current, she paddled through the blue water, yawning, stuck in her daydreams about winning that soft ball championship back when she was ten years old, and after the game her brother had bought her a fudge brownie sundae
and a strawberry milkshake, with a ****** cherry sunk in the whipped cream.  The night grew darker, as her memories turned more emotional. So she  came back to shore, tied the rowboat back to the dock with looping a knot around the nook with a thick rope cord. Then she went back to her apartment house and
crashed on the couch, the blue baseball cap falling onto the floor.

When she woke up from her nap she put her cap back on her head, and
went out on the porch, lit a cigarette, then gazed out at the shining moon
suspended in the clouded sky. She reached out with her arm, her fingers stretched.

The depths of Joshua’s soul lay beyond her touch, and she knew it.
She grounded out the cigarette, went upstairs to her bedroom, shut the door. And then she cried, cried until the hot tears turned icy with the pain, that was wracking her heart with an emotion that staggered like Joshua had when he was in the kitchen that one day, swaying back and forth. Dropping

to the tiled floor, blood running out his nose like a baseball player
stealing home. Then the memory dissipated from her mind, as if it never
come to fruition in the first place. She took off her blue baseball cap.

She held it in her hands. She clutched the wide brim and treaded her fingers around the stitching, wondering why Joshua had to leave her life.

And why she couldn’t let go of this baseball cap.

one night or midafternoon you fell asleep
and snored lightly in my ear.
i stroked your hair (it was longer then)
and thought of my love-lorn words
hijacked by this impermanent sleeper.

i started to laugh and you got lost in my chest
but you said it'd be "a good way to go."
and i heard the sincerity, cheap as silence,
like the first time you drunkenly called me darling
and it was steel wool exfoliating my atriums.

i would rather write about the frivolity
of a cigarette in a hot tub with strangers
and the absurdity of dripping sinuses
or a manifesto for the exasperatingly mediocre
but my words are full of you.

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others–the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.”

nothing we have is greater than this gift
of light in motion on the eastern wall
midafternoon the moments seem to crawl
the music flows and mind appears to drift
from work to sleep always an easy shift
you're tired and your thought's not on the ball
there is no duty and no one will call
no need for passion nor any for thrift
listen the song begins and it is clear
coming a distance and gentle in tone
so many voices urging you to rest
with magic now upon the summer air
announcing that you will not be alone
giving the day that extra bit of zest

The vineyard growing out
of decrepit stationmaster’s hovel flays
the skin of buses and trains alike
faces long and
pe eli  n   g.

Atop a rubber sea I wade,
sunlight ebbing awash
on my strong shoulders;
in pinks
purples
blue and green and grey.

The soot of early midafternoon chokes
up, curling down
my spine,
hug from a friend
in the skeleton of a regulation
seat my mind lays
to rest, soporific
sweet.

Here lie the ruins of a plainsman’s kingdom,
ghost fox says.
Here lie the dust
y wings of Corvus corax, grey
in age. Here lie the
loves and the
dreams and the
hearts of my
ancestors
wholly unholy in their pagan worship,
but:
the vineyard is a graveyard is a home
wild to hold
tame at heart
and there lies my body,
(anything I want it to be)
grapes a-swinging just out of reach-

The fox gets his prize
how sweet it tastes on my tongue.

Give me to carry
just a fragment of the cross.
A single thorn, or single lash
to suffer. A drop of blood.

At your worst, holding you
seemed to make the world make sense -
to you, at least -
but the nurses had lorazepam for that
and in more ways than one
I came to know impotence.

Like a supplicant, eating nothing at all
and playing cards with myself
while waiting for the Visitation.

At your best, I brought Halloween string lights
and Halloween candy for the holy sisters
and pagan holiday or no,
we gave that room the feeling of a convent,
and I wrung my hands while you slept.

Home in midafternoon and anxious
rosaries in azure on the bedsheets
and flowers in brown, on green field
dormant.

Sleeplessness was penance,
and so was I absolved; thus some of that
absolution affixed itself to relics
and that rubber duck on the dashboard
I touched in the morning traffic.
It glowed to say
your spirit was with me.

And though I now can sleep at any hour,
I examine it all the same
for some of Christ’s blood, or his forgiveness,
hoping to find the signet ring of the Pope
or at least some of your halo
where I should expect
the Byzantine absence of it.

What a beautiful surprising life
Is so precious but it cuts you like a knife
A painful sunset shakes thoughts awake
Every evening from the fantasies we make
A bright new sunrise in the early haze
Midafternoon hot like a blaze
Commanding time
Providing light
She rules day
He rules night
The moon cloaked in shades of black
The sun robed in white and blue
Perfect balance to steady the universe
Allowing meaning to all we do
King and Queen of humble Earth
Governing vast sky
Without reciprocation
No complaining
No asking why
How come I am so ungrateful?
Why can't I realize I am blessed?
I should be thanking trees for the oxygen supplied
Instead cursing the air inflating my chest
I need to open my eyes all the way
Look a little harder around
Because on days with no sunshine to be found
Just under clouds that star is still there
Reliably shining away from man's stare
It is true that every second in this world is a gift
Remember next time you feel low and seek a lift
Cherish miracles hidden
Great and small
Gaze towards the heavens when bowed by a fall
Even if you can't see its glow or feel its gentle burn
The sun is there in our stormiest hours
Eventually it's presence will return

IT'S MIDAFTERNOON, I STARE AT THE SKY
I CAN SEE SOME CLOUDS WITH THE SUN FADED DOWN
THE WIND PICKS UP, ADDING A LITTLE FALL CHILL
TO THIS SOUTHERN AIR
WHEN I LOOK AROUND, THE STILLNESS IS  FAIR
I'M WAITING ON THE RAIN, WE NEED IT  DESPARATELY
I GAZE AT MY YARD, I CAN SEE THE LEAVES DROPPING
TO THE GROUND, NO ONE AROUND
THE PLANTS ARE IN PAIN, NOT MUCH RAIN
TOUCH OF HAZE
THE PLANTS ARE IN A DAZE
I WALK ALONG THE WOODS WITH MY DOG,
AT A DISTANCE,STILL HAZY SKY, NO RAIN
SUN STARTING TO GO DOWN AFTER A QUIET AFTERNOON
THIS TOUCH OF HAZE FELT WARM ALL OVER
TIME TO GO IN AND WAIT FOR ANOTHER DAY FOR RAIN
TOUCH OF HAZE

three planes meet
and the midafternoon light graduates
beige to shade to not quite black
softly syncopated
by the curtain on the window
and if it's inverted in the imagination
suddenly staring at the edge of infinity
straining outwards in every dimension
available to the naked eye

in the beginning is the young child
always thinking, questioning why
the sky is blue, why the sun is round,
why the rain falls down.

The Poet
in the early morning is the first one
rising at dawning, before the robin
sings his sweet song, with mind moving
as pistons, shaping, shifting and lifting.

The Poet
in midafternoon, jots down thoughts
on a paper napkin while stirring her
coffee with a spoon. Everything she sees
will be composed into a poem, even some
poor innocent child without their knowing.

The Poet
in the evening hunkers down with
a book, to escape into another man’s
story, cut from the loincloth of his pages
she engages another brilliant mind before
her bedtime.