My darling one,
here is your breeze.
I also send the sun,
my darling one,
and I'm not done:
here, have the Hyades.
My darling one,
here is your breeze.

My hand thinks
of your hand
when the little mirrors
in the street
are broken by
bibs of rain,
& when the white
box clouds
billow to a steam
cuff horizon  
& when the gray collars
of smoke
stand from
sinuous chimneys
over starched
winged elms -
& when we talk and
compare notes
in the lonely ceremonies
of the afternoon.

Years ago, we went down
to the wheat field, it was freezing,
& we idly plucked some burst chaff
before fumbling against a split rail,
the neighbors all watching
from kitchen windows,
let them watch, you said,
as you kissed me,
knees shaking in the yellow lake.

Most of the snow has melted now,
gray dough-banks ****** on curbs
under a wind-lacquered gloss.

The Thai salt sits in me, hours after,
stirs thru blue yarn veins,
sharp in the stomach's wax-pit.

Night declines when lamps snap on:
dead, reclusive salmon eyes that broadcast
onto the cold screens dotting the walk.

I haven't seen anyone for so many days -
my tongue is still as a lake skin.
Lost hearts voyage in whitened dunes

of all my yesterdays. The winter pattern
is so quiet. I am a crease in the fabric,
a black ache in the ruined prism.

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.
-Sylvia Plath, "Contusion"


The job hunt is not going well:
wrong man in wrong city, no timing,
no luck - now I rise with worry

stuck inside my ribs, crouching
fat and cold where the heart was,
new clock flooding me with off-beats

so that I stumble in wrong-footed falls.
I'm fed by only sleep and steady rain:
all news, it turns out, is bad news.

Perhaps tomorrow the sun
will quit and I can take that job,
pacing to and fro, annihilating clouds,

handing things off to the night shift...
But no: I'll wake to indomitable silence,
a dread of mailmen, and ever-hungry cats.

"Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense."
-John Ashbery, Some Trees


After two tiring marriages,
& the women before and between,
she was olly olly oxen free:
come out don't hide it's safe.

Let me backtrack - I was four
& dad left, not too far, but...
far enough. I became, inside,
a two-headed monster of desire:

one me says go find love
grab it hold tight tight tighter;
a second me says wait watch be safe
they're already half out the door.

Feeling free, I gave too much,
or maybe needed same. Or both.
She left, and I was so haunted
I sold my house.

So now I just walk about,
**** an envious ear
at the young and ******
laughing into cut-glass nights.

I scry my sliding self in plate glass
reflections, surrounded by angels
on the hunt, letting the days
engrave their aches all across me.

The two-headed thing I was
is starved lean, fed only on sleep.
What now? This evening
the stars look laminated,

& streetlights hum and mumble
wolfishly over black triangles
of sweetened space where thoughts
hang like last year's ornaments.

It is a night
of champagne and ashes.

Here is a glass
that never stops weeping,

singing your name
with a wheeling hunger.

I sit just nearby,
under yesterday's chandelier,

reaching your sleep
with all ten fingers.

Tonight I'm rioting
with your smile,

and my skin
is insane from wishing.

Tomorrow I will be satisfied
with your wanton eye,

and the clever flood
of your lip.

When I was ten I stepped on a honey bee
resting in the gravel, it stung me and died

& in that moment I tried to bargain with death,
I said I will **** no more bees and in return

I too will not die. Death said nothing, of course,
he, or she, or it, was quiet as an elm or a shingle,

as the millionfold language of the grass.
I imagined assent but now, looking back,

I realize that nothing was finalized,
we never shook on the deal. No, the bee died

on my bare foot, defending itself against
a strange olive hide that blotted the sun.

Three and a half decades later I perch here
in my tower, my brain congested

with depressions, my heart a fallen fog,
my hands ache strangely and my legs tire -

perhaps the best I can manage is to further
the stoic philosophy of the slaughtered bee:

sometimes the best you can do is to slow
a shadow that's more real than the object.

I cast a spell in the afternoon:
a wand flicks and a cat vanishes

only to reappear chewing on a feather
with a small plastic baseball attached,

both strung on elastic cord that runs
to the black stick in my hand.

She gnaws the baseball bird,
conqueror, dominant victor

in her bedspread domain.
The other cat sullenly spies

with side eye, eager to join
but loathe to wrestle the calico.

With another spell, the feather is freed
to flight across couch, across chair,

bouncing with fat temptation
until it returns to the patchwork lair

of the huntress, who snakes a paw
to stop all renegade motions.

These are the death throes
of the baseball bird, whose final arc

ends in fang and claw on a quilt square
that purrs darkly with city sunset.

First you get a swimming pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
Pool full of liquor,
then you dive in it
-Kendrick Lamar, "Swimming Pools"

O milky cataracted eye of moon -
your brow a brittle wet-black shadow
of grave silence and starry freckle -

your gibbous gaze is cast at me,
but what do you see?
A poet who refuses to grow up,

who drinks scotch like wine,
& wine like water. Whose heart
stains his sleeve, who listens

to gin glories and sin stories,
slurring insurrections from the red
nest in the middle branches of me.

At 17 I dated a librarian who I loved
& thought I would marry.
God, how I loved her...

but it failed on a windy night
in a dorm littered with beer cans
& her pale blue infidelities.

Then at 23 I married, things slid
& slid and slid, the nights blurry
& dead; then there was nothing left.

At 28, the girl who was so angry
we were banned from seven bars
after she broke glass at my face,

crying and screaming and kissing me.
At 29 I dated the blonde *******,
who wanted a master and not a lover,

impatiently splayed across the bed,
waiting for someone I wasn't,
waiting for the perfect sober iron lash.

I dated and married, then did it again,
my moon always in Pisces,
my soul here and there,

a mechanism more than a man,
depression echoing like a bell
from Dublin to DC and back.

My father died of drink,
& sometimes when I'm in my cups
I contemplate my own destinies.

This family drinks its anesthesia,
accepts a ghosting numbness
& pretended ignorance. Don't look -

the prodigal son has fallen
on the threshold, and the moon
has no arms to lift him up again.

Belted star! Swing from the sea,
the gin is free, and we will drink out here
against the rail, needed company:
To my chagrin I’ve called her once again,
sleepless in Chicago’s restless drives.
She lets me know it’s not the night
to reconnect the nervous histories dreamed
between us in a single anxious twitch -
imperfect people love imperfectly.
Belted star, half-drunk on gin,
let's begin to count the countless
wraithly sheetings of the wind,
before I'm called inside by spills
of sotted laughter, and you're dimmed.

We lapped the ice as it came apart,
breathing the thick frost in pieces
that melted in the lung.

We raced. It all caved in
before our eyes, chrome drop,
aching flakes mounted our hair.

Faster, Emily, faster –
loosen the knees that hold flight in them,
as white evening’s fallaway comes.

I quit two miles before. I sat in the car
and watched in wonder as you hit the vanishing point
and became this snow lyric.

Deleted from glass
by water greens,
I slake a gutter
of scotch.
Over the floats
of black holly
galaxies rip
like stockings.
Jealousies clump
in deathbed lanes,
sag across bedposts.
Swiped away,
I eat the dark of the hand.
Sleepless station,
thinned in the wash.

He thought at us in hissing chops,
our phones open lone black lids

& bloom our rooms with oddities,
raving cardiac tumbles into blank scrawl

that came from no place we knew,
sloughed from an under-yeared heart.

The pain pressed out from the glass,
topographical agonies in the dark,

a rake's frenzies of bleak humor
aimed at no one in particular

until it drained to a feverish bankruptcy -
he asked how M. G. died, if we thought

that's what would happen to him.
Who knows what the others thought -

I felt his mind bedded down in self,
a corner stall of gravel and nails,

tried to distract with jokes of my own,
don't know if it worked or not.

The phone in hush, the hour now
delinquent, adrift, exhausted.

In the hills, the cities: he braced us
each to the next, acid-pitted night minds.

You are somewhere between
my awaiting gaze and
the awaiting days that
sit on the tongue's edge
of history, under sun's
streak that hems our world.

You are something between
the wise words of Hikmet and
the wise words of your own,
flown to me from
the Bosphorus,
full of wishes.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

The market of sleep
   is full of false starts
& the gingery moon's
   just a pock-marked heap.

Down in the office
   there's a tunnel of nothing
& tongues are falling
   with heavy high profits.

Brown hair of fall
   blue legs of summer,
fumble the moment's
   drift-hearted crawl.

The night sky is only
   a black dead dough,
& late in the morning
   hands are so lonely.

The west side pilots
   have left me again
& the abetting sun
   has bedded my violets.

There I am, in the cold glass:
looking back at my half-self.

Beyond me, my neighbors bundle
in and out of their kitchens,

parcel from bedroom to bathroom
in their sweatshirts, pajamas,

their old night clothes.
I just watch from a black shell

that fumes and blossoms
with hasty glasses of *****.

I sit in the dark because
there is no one who will visit -

I feel bones under the skin.
I feel how thin it all is.

I gave myself away for years, but
the lights are all snapped off now,

even the gaslights are turned off.
Streetlights rescind their beams.

My neighbors never look back out
into the street. Their eyes are flattened

with yesterdays and tomorrows.
Their yellow squares go low.

We, all of us, hear the song that slips
from the moon pocket, calls the frost.

You travel today
to Belgrade:
nightclub-on-quay.
You travel today
on an hour's ray
over green brocade.
You travel today
to Belgrade.

"I am, in my condition, a prince"
-The Tempest, Act III, scene i

Hushed, hunched night -
with wet beaks of yellow,
cars cut cancerous flowers
into glass-skinned stores -

pornographic eyes spill and wave
from rolled faces rioting free
of the short-hour restaurants,
into leaves green as billiard felt.

The self-poisoners are out tonight,
their shouts like jaundiced fireworks.
A moon-breast hangs heavily
in a night thin as gauze.

Up on my mazurka hill,
far above the blistered river,
I consider my options.
I'm deep in the dying, but -

despite my condition -
a prince of bottle and verse.
Black gears, tongue-and-groove,
force the night forward.

Reader - I'm alone tonight -
consider this an open invitation.
The secret knock is this:
Three, then one, then two -

by this will I know it's you,
come to talk poetry long
into the whaling hours,
debating the merits of it all.

Bring nothing but your thoughts,
I have wine enough for us all,
& if the wine fails, I have scotch.
The words will carry us to morning.

We winter creatures, here in the streets
under the cloud flat, the moon-press,
are bound to our random anywhere points,

with interior images in each: loves, agonies,
strangers we met for a close moment -
the world is filled with us, seeded with us...

The air is cold, it gathers around the mouth.
Dying wisps of speech arch up and away
in small hoods of steam and intention.

Rain digs into my cheek like teeth.
This street is an echo of the next street,
& it's papered with names, so many names.

Brandy in my blood,
thoughts riding across
the pink plain of my hand.
M Street confessions
come cheap this time
of year, when
cherry flowers tint
the air with their
exploding heads.

Her version of me
seems better than mine -
I'm always out in the distance
selling rain back to the clouds.
Spring's coarse branch
clubs the brownness
of my unspooling eye.

Is she second-guessing?
Who can blame her?
I have burned all
my wild dreams
into flakes and cinders.
My art is hungry,
a nest of grinding teeth.

Froichd-uilinn - the second drink of the day, taken while propped up on your elbow

I sink my bones, crooked in mattress,
lower the liquor to lip as calving sun
leaks through the east-faced pane.

I think back to La Fontaine Sully
in La Marais, on the way back
from the graveyard...

But to what profit?
My memory slices me open,
revealing a slow web of star-gutted stairs.

"Immer augen" my grandmother says,
or said, or will say. The street slouches
with honey-feet, red wine drips into the river.

Fashionable diners spread themselves
across the sidewalk. Laughter launches
like stones into this tower window.

Old thoughts are a slaughter.
A marriage didn't happen.
Bright lights against the meat-black

of night, the shroud-cloth
over my own face, lips wet
& shining with liquor.

Please, love, worry not,
it'll go your way.
If it feels for naught,
please, love, worry not,
for all will be as it ought,
and by your side I'll stay.
Please, love, worry not,
it'll go your way.

You're sitting in profile
in your favorite red jacket.
Your one eye focuses
on maple pages,
a sweep of hair
recklessly dashes
across the water
of your brow.

When the connection drops,
you are frozen like that,
scalloped by shadow,
sleeveless purple shirt
drifting an eclipse
up your arm.

For a profile like that,
I would sell all of this...

Flurries drop
into the river
just beyond
the Navy Yard.

The flakes divide
at first, but then
the air warms over
the dull marine chop

& they get thick
& woolly and just
stumble into gray
dough-castles.

Snowfall only drops
for a night or two
& then it waits for
entropic days.

I saw two snow eagles
and a naked girl
The one was the other
and the girl was none
-Federico Garcia Lorca, "Ode to the Dark Doves"


We drove all night to Long Island
to the Islip shoreline wedding
as knees of snow bent over us.

We knew it was our last stand,
all the endless arguments were finished
& all we had left was black market ***.

With this classmate's marriage
our bond was in its last hours.
Frost-fleece freckled the bay face,

crested skin chopped and skimmed,
as her licentious hand drifted quietly
across the dark car division to my thigh -

she loved when I was pinned like this,
waiting for her next move; soon enough
she persuaded even the snow to pause.

At the hotel the room heat was off,
so we turned it on and looked out
on still, bleach-banked hill backs

& things between us were hushed
until she undid her chilled hair
it dropped slowly to shoulder

& she said don't move, don't move at all;
I could see my breath hanging in air,
as I was undressed and given to the cold.

She walks the city
as it wakes.
Under cloud committee
she walks the city.
The river's pretty
as morning breaks.
She walks the city
as it wakes.

Dr Weathers wakes
to a ridging howl,
frostbitten, snowblind,
stumbles rudely ahead
on cold black feet,
& hands that might
belong to another –
they went solid in the night.
He plows white weight
as if underwater, the sun
suppressed behind banks & steeps.
But the mountain also rejuvenates –
he is curiously younger,
an adolescent dismay
of being cut loose and held back,
both at once, as the wind steals
bellows from his teeth.  
And then younger still –
teetering march step,
speech blanches in the throat,
his thoughts mirror his needs.
Imagine what the lower guides see
as he arrives, his face
porcelain in the light -
venous glaze, stony veil.
Imagine his infantile thoughts
as they swaddle him,
so glad to be awake.

Things between us
have reached such a low
that I'm drunk at noon
on a Wednesday in October.

But what if I grabbed the sun
for you, shaking it free
from lacy palms of cloud,
and gave it to your greennesss?

Would it be enough to fix it?
Or are all these drams
of Scotch just turning out
dreams in the early afternoon?

for Lori


Foaming Pacific ovals
sweep cold over nephew's knees -

his laughter breaches sandy mount,
from flashing white crescent

of pepperminted mouth.
Palms above the char pit

chaperone my brother-in-law
as he hisses open enameled cans

of sweet seltzer. My sister
trades antique desert stories

with my aunt. Someone slings
Monopoly hotels back into the box.

August is climbing eastwards,
bringing a fog bank

that won't stop arriving,
arriving, always arriving.

Out beyond the chilling rain
that crawls along the window pane
you arrive into this city.

I sip coffee and calmly wait,
watch the glimmer of your plane,
out beyond the chilling rain.

The heavy clouds are strangely straight,
and through their splitting throat's refrain
you arrive into this city.

From my body's thin estate,
black capes of breath emerge and strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,

to gather by the open gate
where with your bright campaign
you arrive into this city.

The dawn seems oddly late,
but I know that in this hour's strain,
out beyond the chilling rain,
you arrive into this city.

I love you
like eating bread dipped in salt
like waking up burning at night
like drinking water straight from the tap.
like opening the heavy package in the mail
without knowing what it is,
excited, happy, suspicious
I love you
like crossing the sea for the first time
like something moving inside me
when night falls softly over Istanbul
I love you
like thanking God that we're alive.

[Seviyorum seni
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ağzımı dayayıp musluğa su içer gibi
Ağır posta paketini
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telaşlı, sevinçli, kuşkulu açar gibi
Seviyorum seni
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A blitz of hairy sun
broke the neighbor's
camel-breaded lip
& thumbed its way
into bed with me.
The new couch
was shining
like silver bread,
& the cat stalked coinage
across the wainscot face.
Pulling myself
from Saturday's tomb,
I mutinied against
this frenzied easting,
befriending a bottle
whose contents
was gauze for the heart -
even at 7,
I can only think of you.

Young men in glazy unison
wreck over lipstick shoals

until last call's klaxons
lure a few to paddle back

& pony up for a last fist
of foaming heart.

I'm past my sailing days,
so I watch from hot shade

with germanium on/off eyes,
surrounded by ten brave

who said yes to an evening.
Leaving into the electric bower

under bud-sparked trees,
our heels are free of night,

everything is open,
& forty-five seems no great age.

Where is your body
when you text me?

In the searching dark
of the bedroom, where

the drunks and gulls
bear cries against the window?

On the riverwalk
when the clouded gray

syrup leaks through
onto the water face?

By the fresh red trees?
The third floor coffee?

The archery garden,
near the strawberry tree?

I will tell you, darling,
that my hands are busy

filling these lines
3379 miles and 5 hours west

of your river city -
but I wish they were busy,

following the lines of your nape,
your shoulder, your smile.

Our chemistry
is so wrecked.
I adore you -
you don't adore me,
but maybe you do,
you are so depressed,
we're just waiting that out
& seeing how things feel after.
In the meantime, you treat me
alternatingly like a casual
acquaintance and a former lover,
while I am unwavering in my
devotion to your cause.
I cried for an hour at my desk
because I am so unhappy.
Please let this end,
please come back
to who you were.

"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." -John 1:5

I find whisky grammar in the cold sluices,
in the curve of the thickened glass-ash.

The bourbon cask gave its woody soul
to the barley spirit, to the amber shadow.

The New Year comes but I reject it;
the sun-ball drifts yellowing like an old page,

the moon rises like a bleached skull.
Ireland came and went, full of green iron secrets.

My life was full, but now it is empty.
I live in a high room full of guitars,

full of alcohol, full of deathly ulcers,
full of Plath and her sweet ether.

The air is seared. The water boils.
The witch shakes her hazel wand,

& demons sigh in resignation - why bother?
Humans move the darkness in little pieces.

Somewhere in Sicily, in Silesia, in Kent,
my blood is moving without me. My blood -

it's loving another. It's never had a headache.
It actually lives a full life, somewhere else,

that good red life. But not here: Here,
I drink in the old cemetery, with the blurry pebbles.

The train's
cleated toes
perch on volts
before dipping
into the cobalt
hologram of
morning.

White pebbled
floor reflects
in the window,
the platform's
strip of faces
wades through
ghostly stars.

The train climbs
the rusted ladder
with humming
hands. The anthem
of sun a blinding
glint on the hide
until it shrieks
into the earth.

Tunnel's halogen
skin dappled
with aluminum
song. This is
my stop, step
through the
birthing wings
into the ceramic
meadow. Gate
opens, subtracts -

I'm an Orpheus,
looking back as
a silvered Eurydice
is pulled away
from me with
a scream.

The left-hand
shadow of
the ocean
curdles in
the small of
the back,
& legs ache
down dune
lanes, dawn-
marbled
sand squares,
pine-pitted,
while lungs rub
the court of ribs.

I'm looking
for anything
that resembles
a memory
of my father.

Salting sun,
mezcal splash,
spiced crab -
hints of him
here and there.

I carry him
in a cradle
of tattoos
across my
arms but
it's not
the same.

So I run
the beaches,
recalling
the time we
stopped at
a flooded
road on the
way into
the city and
Dad thought
for five solid
minutes about
whether we might
make it across
the dark water.

The great key is twisting in the lock -
the keyhole moon is spinning.

Empty bottles rise like grass
from the ceramic tile.

The scattering people on the street
slice little hunks of joy

from the black slab
that squats over the city.

The sky is vacant,
the stars vacuumed away

so casually, replaced
by a fat cobalt shroud.

The scents of gin and ****
finger up through the humid cloak

before disappearing from human record.
This bed is a pit of silence,

a soft red hell, a place
for lonely drunks who turn the world,

waiting for her to come round,
come round, come round.

How surreal -
the wind
rustled itself
into my hand
as I spoke
to the girl
across the sea.

She could
hear it
as it purred
in the cup
of my palm.
It followed
me for blocks,
voweled
& agitated.

But nothing
could tear
my ear
from the girl
and her laugh.

Blue dregs are hanging
each to each on the line,  

& ash tendons pull
as cirrus takes the stair.

Overflowing night is emptied
in the twine of our sleep,

& we wake, suspended
in our own eye.

There is a silver splash
perched in the bathroom

where the hand finds itself
encased in breath,

a throwaway gesture that drifts
over to the new corner,

& finds shape as your face,
shielded in cloud.

I was once
told that I
wasn't afraid
of heights,
but of being
thrown from
them -
& this was
a comfort,
for the flaw
wasn't in me,
per se, but in
my reading
of other people,
my trust in
their intentions.
Even so, any
bridge was
breathing
knives.

Then I met
you, and we
walked over
Taft bridge,
the largest
unreinforced
concrete
structure in
the world,
rising above
Rock Creek
gorge, 128 feet
above the
bright green
floor I feared
until you.

We crossed it
in style. I was
in the angle
of the eagle.
I walked on
the backs of
lions. I held
light. My eye
surveyed the
depths of the
glen. I walked
with you by
my side all
the way to
Dupont,
& when we
shared coffee -
I spoke endlessly
to comfort your
excess of sun -
I felt a swerve
of glory, a sense
of the world
that I only
shared with you.

We talk
late into
the street,
the trees
seem to
come loose
and drift
out into
the night sky.

In the farthest
distance,
galaxies
break apart
into strings
of stars.

You're in
Dublin,
lovely
in your step,
in your voice,
in the stocking
you rip
so idly.

I watch
people
stroll across
the broad
walk of
apricot
stones.

I watch
the dark
green sky
drop centuries
down the
Spanish steps.

I listen
as you
enchant
my phone
with sighs.

The world
is so small,
crossing
the bedposts
of the sun.

The world
is so large,
on the beach
of your
laughter.

Soft draft of moon
& rescinding cloudburst
over green-oiled yard:
April night.

I'm hanging above
a checkered floor,
Lucy's on the other side
singing La Vie En Rose.

I wonder for a moment
if I could love you
into loving me,
but let's face it:

it's never worked before.
When she hits Night Shift
and I think how the lines
knock me out one by one

I just let go.
I shift against the bar
and serve as
my own self-prophet:

"I'll tell you when
I'm dying of something"

Dear Z----,

Once, maybe, I was an Orpheus -

one of millions (there are still millions),
calling someone back from an underworld -

once, maybe, I had candles for fingers,
stars leaking from my teeth,
eyes that broke barred doors in twain.

But not now. You were so shy
at the bar's short shoal
giving me rain-in-Montreal smiles,
hinting at a history of disappointment.

Sometimes, it all changes in a single night -
but the magic failed us both.
I will always wonder.

So I am sorry: my hands, my eyes...
my starry mouth a wide sorry-slash.

I have to go. -E

Tipsy on their Labor Day,
in rakia you're swimming.
Through hill's rooms you play,
tipsy on their Labor Day,
a heady plum bouquet,
glass waving, brimming,
tipsy on their Labor Day -
in rakia you're swimming.

T-----,

My guitar chattered in my hand
at the elm and oak wall of spring

as you beat drums with a covert heart,
strutting tattoos that died in ****.

But you didn't show on Saturday,
or the one after either,

leaving us drumless in the pool hall,
having to call Jimmy quick -

at sixteen we were quick to forgive.
You went into the Army

but left under a strange cloud
after an incident in the mountains.

After that at the odd house party
I watched the goodness leave you,

a lake sweltered away to motes.
After you fought Rory on the planks

of night you were unwelcome,
you vanished into mummy's threads,

hillish murmurs and silhouettes,
just an occasional twenty-year thought

I have when winter's stretch succumbs
to green oak glitters, vivid loaves of elm.

Even so, I send you my best.
-Evan

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.