Once upon a time, I scratched out
verses in dozens to a girl over the sea -
O, I was no naif, two divorces

had cooked me down to syrup,  
my heart was leather-withered,
wary of wonderlands and Technicolor.

Yet I held faith that love might
be the blossom and not the vine -
even as she closed her interior doors,

even as we came rapidly to zugzwang.
In a broken green betrayal
I watched Dix Pour Cent for hours,

tried to sell away the lonely murk,
trade inconstant moon for steady sun,
Akhenaten in a third-floor studio

for two and half years of sag and salt.
But as often happens time and chance
hewed new love and now I sit with her

in a tiny theater to see Romeo and Juliet;
Romeo just took four shots of rail whisky
to the delight of the wet blurry mouths

that roar from clay-thick shadows
beyond the clutch-cloth footlight fringe.
After the lovers die in stony Verona

we leave and somehow end up at Stan's,
a bricky subterrestrial parlor where
with cocktails we thresh from our heads

the melancholy of a troubled world:
sirens mourn the mauveness of evening
& clouds are killed, ripped to wisp.

When the yellow/green face
of this furnace valley is smudged
with summer's first rain runs

I dream about dad again:
7 years since that hospital bed
in Georgetown where he turned

to wax and I turned to water.
In the dream I was so small,
he took me to his old '80s office,

the tan portable in the field where
everything was cheap wood panels,
thin mouse-brown temp carpet.

He sat me down by his blackboard,
jotted with number theory,
& left to retrieve a book he needed.

I sat among the dry sun and dust
until I realized I was an adult now.
Eventually a man came to the door,

& said "why are you still here?
Your dad died years ago,
& we need the room."

he said
“whatever you’re doing, keep doing that”
and I laughed
barking French seals

for doing months of work
taking sledgehammers to who I was
and gutting my soul
bare.

breaking everything intangible
and building her again

opening the crawl spaces
where the spiders lay layered

the basement with lounging leaders
diplomats in fear
wrapped in anger
and anxiety

Laying them all out in the open
Sunshine burning their skin
whispering a thank you
and the softest goodbye

cause the doors were wide open
with nothing left to hide

so come in the front door, and I’ll greet you like an old friend
just now with a curfew

slurs the woman in her cups
when I tell her I write poems
late in the lonely evening.

She waves at the air conditioner
that mulches silence to hum lull,
"it's all just chemicals, physics,

actions and reactions, man."
Hard to argue with logic birthed
betwixt brain and frothing marrow

of glassy pint, so I tell her sure, ok,
& move the subject back to her son
who snaps time-lapse photos of ice

abandoning the toes of hills.
Still, her self-certainty rankles:
when I leave I pause and gaze up

at the sprinkled smears wetted
flat across the matte night melt,
any of which might be pouring

purring stanzas from radio teeth,
long-wave nigh-black rhymes
if we had ear enough to listen.

I heave homeward on clock feet,
blackbirds gashing the fog hedge,
as raw verse gnaws my thought.