"It's raining in my skull,"
says the woman who creases

matter-of-factly into sunned chop
of stone beside me on a city corner;

her eyes topple and drop into
her sullied mauvish oval bag

which spills crowds of rag and bone
into her floral fields of lap.

Then: a sudden psithurism
fences us in elm tilt, we sag

into the listen; what strange words
these foredoomed leaf-curls brush

into prose, sericeous speech
that smuggles death lessons

through the ring of afternoon.
It shakes us both: a mouthful

of extermination addressed
to us in the language of night places.

An empire of silence is reinstated
for a lonely tyrant minute until

the bus arrives; she gathers
her handfuls of sparks and solemns,

steps up into the air, and is gone.
Alone, I rescind every mercy I was ever given.

My cat child
brings order where there was none.
Let's not talk about the walnut shell of my womb,
empty birthplace of dust.
Let's talk about my cat child, proud with powers, handy with struts.

Now, listen--
I have forgotten all about you.
I've heard that I was in love once, but who knows?
Show me the evidence; I'll yawn elaborately, and my cat child will agree
that such stuff is dull in the extreme.
Dead fish, on the other hand, become more riveting every minute.

You would not have understood my cat child.
At least, that's my foggy instinct about it.
You would have objected to the damage, the **** and the fleas.
The rumor is, cats were royal once,
and I need the reflected glory and the chance to sleep during the day.

Right now, my cat child is away.
She is hungry for mice, songbirds, or someone's leg.
Me, I don't eat anymore, can't recall why I ever did--
I remember nothing, value nothing, aspire to nothing.

But once,
The feel of my mouth closing gently over the curve of your soft lower lip
seemed such an urgent thing,
like warm waves for mermaids,
a place I would do anything to get to.
Yes once,
the sight of your dark hair sent warm honey over my heart,
my belly,
my ***,
and everywhere, my love, from my skin to the stars.

Now, though,
I have forgotten all that.
What were we talking about? I have no idea.
Now there is only the glare of afternoon
and the magnificence of my cat child who has given me nine lives--
none of them worth a ****,
all as dead in the mouth as a finch with a broken neck.

Sacrament of an autumn park:
yellow wafers on green tongue,
blowsy refrains of early dark.
Head spilling and heart sprung,
I step across these broken shields
to a new-faced evening street
under clouds with bruisy weals
that peel, reveal white meat
of moon, sliced thin to eat
& maybe sate a null that gnaws,
a null that was born when I was:
a branch is incomplete
until the last leaf falls,
transfigured into scrawl.

A tide imperceptibly rises,
a sun dies just a little more.
New lamppost starlight
blooms but fails to hide
a carpaccio of night
pounded thin and fried;
autumn thoughts of all sizes
clot in the gut, a bezoar
that might be a bitter cure
for tomorrow's sweeter troubles
which double and then redouble.
Yet even a heart-worn raconteur
reveres leaf-fallen days;
wind rips a brittle baize.

Love's lost today
in teeth's glaciers;
& pallbearer feet,
tho pigeon-toed,
march me away
from erasure.
A heart escheats
to whom it's owed,
one must repay;
for love's nature
is grieving fleet,
& must erode -
an ache to rehearse,
repeated in verse.

"It's quite a pretty hell,
quite a pretty hell,"

said the wilting woman
to her plastic window self,

a half-tint fetch, etched
in the eye of the weevil

threading the black dough
of the crosstown bus route.

The nightclubbers behind her
exchange glances and hold hands

as she begins to hum to herself,
but the unvarnished melody

lodges in an angle of odd brain
& soon I'm humming it too

as I step into 18th Street's maw,
already bristling neon sweet

with milkmaid dress hems
threshing ruptured doorsteps -

turning up my street I catch
a last sight of the shushed bus husk

crawling away northwards
with only a scratching hum inside

for its heartbeat, and a face lost
in the catacomb of its reflection.

I once knew a man in a chair
made of cracked maroon hide,

he was wreathed by reefs of smoke
rooted in pipe-glow, and he told me

how youth was all maybes: maybe
I'd pan for gold in a cold course,

maybe love would drape me flashing
in slices like Christmas tinsel, or

maybe I'd **** someone who stumbled
into the road under pitiless wheels.

It's all just a handful of maybes,
held loose, dealt at random

as our paths divide, divide again,
divide into myriad matrices

of still further divisions: because
we're plural, we're entire armies

of fortune, and we fill cemeteries
with our regrets. Strange-faced

angels are also our oldest devils,
& anything can happen to anyone.

Until, said my friend with the pipe,
you reach a certain point in life

when maybe thickens to never.
When sourdough hearts know

that division is over, and it's entropy
steering our dwindling gambles,

when the lacunae are closer, more real
than memories of any yesterday.