I was fifteen
in a birthday
room for Alan.
Lamps out,
air thick
with the flick
& sag of
a movie.
My slick hand
taken by the girl
on the floor.
White noise burst
in my mouth.
My heart
crawled
down the stairs.
The lamps
puffed on
and she slipped
my hand.
Each cone and
rod in her
green eyes
glistened,
adolescent.

I saw her again
at a house party
when I was
twenty-three.
Drunk on
Haitian ***,
carving out
a blood rhythm
under
a canopy
of memory.
Her lips shined
in memorial
to what teenagers
had been, once.

Later, I threw up
the *** into
the bushes
below the kitchen
window and I heard
her turn
off the faucet with
an indifferent laugh.

Laces even
as sutures
carry midnight miles
at the black river,
the broken-backed
streets of Georgetown,
a silent yard
of snow roses.

The anvil of night
just stops there,
& the chandelier
of air tightens
slight as wire.
Vaults of cold
ache in their arches,
as back windows
broadcast lives
vaguely beyond
fraying wreathes
of fog.

This is a city
of runners.
Thousands
cut open
the moment
& burn flight
onto the winter weave.
Skin is song.
The heart cants
forward, leaning
into the fallaway.
Always forward,
always forward,
runners sing -
there is nowhere
else to go.

Black lips eat hours
all over Dublin -
but you sleep safely
in the red yesterdays
of my knot-bell heart.

Night's face
on the pane,
gin's lip slips,
a dark dress spills
into the grave
of unfinished speech.

Yet perfect thoughts
sputter down,
candied eyes
launder the late hour,
& embroidered shadows
of perfect length
& distance pour from
lye-bright lamp.

Everything is blue:
the night-skin, blooming
with ten thousand street lamps;
the hall light in the stolid building
across the street, where shadows
drift leftwards like old smoke;
the dead clouds, that process
themselves across a drum-tight
cobalt heaving with rain;
the restaurant at closing time;
the cars that push up and down
the gaudy road;
the laughing bridge above
the humid blue park.
The city drinks ink and chokes,
throwing blue dice,
forgetting everything.

Stay in
late on Sunday,
when sleeves of keening rain
drape downcast hollies by the street.
Come here...

O xanthous brickwork, your scars
canted with shadow... my mirror platter
cries on the left hand side, and cool air
settles in the burnished tree tops.

It's almost October and the days just pile
on top of each other without any meaning in them.
I wet my face at the vessel, soap to soak,
waiting for the death of the aloe flower

that perches on its lonely stalk,
defiant and sorrowful, tendril shaking
in a cold busker's breeze.
Scuttling traffic claws into the dim hour,

the sun wests away; brick goes dark,
browning like steak. The air rises
into the ape-hour to meet the landslide
of dead angels flickering across the band.

I'm hunting the moon
with a harpoon of wine -
and you'll be here soon.

Play the wicked tune
that licks my spine
as I'm hunting the moon.

Pillows' scrimshaw dunes,
my veins like vines -
because you'll be here soon,

a swoon
bound with ribbon and twine.
I'm hunting the moon,

as it climbs in my room
trailing white foamy brine -
you'll be here soon.

It sways and croons
atop us, crystalline:
I'm hunting the moon,
for you'll be here soon.

"What's your greatest ambition?"
"To become immortal, and then die."
-Jean-Luc Godard in Truffaut's Breathless


O immortal reader:
join me now (in a pine grove)

where in last night's dream
I attended my own funeral.

Oh no, it's not so morbid
(think of Tom Sawyer).

Besides, at 4:30 (not even dawn),
cats woke me in the half light

before the thing in the grave pit
began stirring and branching

(upwards? downwards?).
Instead I heard the speeches,

(tremulous and sentimental).
I saw the old pictures pinned

to the poster (I looked decent).
No one would talk about how,

how it happened,
but everyone said "I never

thought it would be like this."
(What does that mean?)

And, most mysterious of all,
"At least he achieved his ambition."

When I woke (born to shadow),
I had no idea what that might be,

but pennants of dawn are flying
over a moon drowning in a coffee cup.

Stout gulls shriek out
divorcing moments
as highways sag,
knocking margarita lights
one into the next.
Checkout is Sunday morning,
lobby as vacant as on arrival -
sign the check,
go through the motions.

The man in the white
sequin jacket shoulders
his way down Q Street
to 17th where jutting

red lights tint night
on blacktop, folding,
splayed across the feet
of the ladies strutting.

Screwtop wine's pylons
trip the turn as throats
strain to cheer & scream
as favorites drift by,

spitting "come on,
baby," then float
away, down the dream,
slipping us some thigh.

Behind me, an Italian
man breaks up
with his boyfriend over
the phone.

Around us a battalion
of truculent drunks
with fabulous drovers
ride some rolling crones.

An old sad cuss
continually thumbs
some poorly angled
shots of legs

Racing for the bus,
we quilt our memory from
spare light spangles,
wild dregs.

I was a winter's seventeen
as I stared out the window
of an old 91 Pontiac
at two in the morning
& saw the golden grass
churning the leaking dark
of the middle school meadow.
The moon died, was reborn
to a scaffold's womb.
We stayed up, but didn't speak.
Not even when we saw
amber hands gripping the field brow,
arranging the morning.
She started the car in the strip lot
& stole me home.

Earhart is static.
In Pacific attics,
searchers hunt smoke,
fold maps, pragmatic.
But the search for fires stoked
with brush is done. She provoked
the upper angels unprepared,
and was broken.
It’s so clear, all the air
over this sea: no twist or glare
blots the view for miles,
though magnetic snares
****** with fields of smiles
the wayward compass, routes
drift from proscribed aisles.
Did she ditch in the blue mute
expanse, flare's salute
a last hope to unwind miles?
Planes get drawn back. It's moot.

O cyclopean sun,
mounting and diving
the broad chamber,
blue over blind,
yellow rhyme,
lambent cirrus-stained eye...
I walk your heart.

A silver lake of fog
rests by the ten oaks.

Smoke shivers too,
thin as a wafer.

Against the clouds
is a mirage of small birds.

Massless morning,
scalloped rain,

long as Sunday,
old as poison.

Spring is gin
weeping
in the hand,
Malbec against
the wrist,
the deep-drafted
light cresting
all their laughter.

It's hard to bear
when I'm over
here, in the other
hand of the night,
running beneath
the moon as it
wanes down
into the river,
as if trying
to push me
your way.

****** wine-light crawls
the window ledge in Chelsea.
From our hotel room we can see
a blond wig fall to the floor
in an orange room across West 28th.
Out on the street, brown beer stains
spread across the peculiar night cloth.

People who can forget can let go;
the rest of us will remember
the way the moon rolled over
the highrises in Little Italy
by Gelso and Grand,
& got stuck in her eye;
I died more than a little.

The night is filling up
with white wine and
other people's laughter,
but you are asleep,
moon-touched.
Can you hear the sea,
from your corner
windows, lapping
the stonework until
it's faceless?
Can you catch
that brief scent
of snow, before
the clouds dive?

No matter if you can't.
I send this
to tell you
what you are -
a flash of truth.

I post a warning,
old friend:
I feel violently
about everything
you remember.

Like when
American iron
thrummed the air
all the way down
to Richmond.

Your future wife
had uneven floors.
I said hello
& was defined by it,
I was just
hello forever.

Peeling paint
rubbed off
on my fingers
as you two
went up
the braid of stair.

You in your
old shirt,
while I stood
unsteady,
filled with
the glassy venom
of cheap gin.

A bared sun tops
a chilly world,
last call's red
trees, yesterday's

rain, this shallow
scrape of hours
that pulls apart,
raw, gin-dipped,

a moon waxing over
the rose bush. This
is our ritual now,  
the breezy screen

of moments that hides
what is really felt.
Speaking your fear
makes it real. The rest

of it is all hard, too
Better to let silence
climb and fall. It's cruel,
those leaves.

Never Fear, love, never fear,
although you only know me here.
If the distance feels austere,
never fear, love, never fear.
For when I am at long last near,
touch to touch at our premiere,
you'll never fear, love, never fear,
although you only know me here.

Black crash
pillow's face,
twilled to
the old nightmare.

Ironic that
the child who
spent years
fighting
the father
who left,
the mother
who curled,
ended up
divorcing
year after year.

This night
shone with
shedded
skin. I
walked away.
The moon
was pregnant
with an
airless sea.

I woke from
all of this
feeling like
a wreck
that might
be saved
by you,

but the miles
between us
argue so
persuasively.

Do you
think about
when we
discovered
hornets
in the grass
lot by the
apartment?
They were
drunk on
fallen apples,
and just
watched us
laconically.

I hope you
think about
yourself the
same way -
look back
& remember
you were
a hornet,
lance-cruel,
drunk on sugar,
having wings
you didn't use,
as I walked away.

I'm sure
you don't
think of me
at all. Good -
I hope that
I am your
lacuna.

Sweet woman with black hair
your life is electric
intelligence floods your eyes.
When you laugh for me
your smile washes the world.

Getting closer to you
by breath and romance
like in a storybook.
I'm writing you this poem late at night
while even my candle is asleep.


Siyah saçlı tatlı kadın
senin hayatın elektrik
zeka gözlerinizi doldurur.
Benim için güldüğünde
gülüşün dünyayı yıkar.

Sana yakınlaşmak
nefes ve romantizmle
bir hikaye kitabındaki gibi.
Sana bu şiiri gece geç saatlerde yazıyorum
mumum bile uyurken.

White wine bottle on its side:
lilacs pooling under plate lip
in a sudden, sodden gutter
of roughened moon-cloth...

The ice numbs the wrist;
my name is absent on the list.
Quarries of coffee grounds,
are excavated inside my eye:

names are so clear now,
like glosses of witch-hazel.
But what of the empty iris pit?
Linen flocks against stone,

& memory's evergreen hold
is strong: green queen-needles
mixed with the little pink curls
shaved off the inside of the skull.

Cherish the little triangles of skin
trapped by the dial tone collar:
it's all breaking away.
What is happening to me?

Christmas drifts by
under insensate stars,
under a blue scarf
of evening, under
some ether, under
risers of smoke.

Yellow Spot is poured,
& moments begin
to skip away
into the fallaway rain.
Christmas is red fingernails
and a green sweater.

Christmas freights along
in shovels and palms.
It walks the streets.
It drops into parks, silently.
It sips its Yellow Spot,
or something like that.

An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
-John Steinbeck

Lately I've dreamt so much of death
that death surely also dreams of me.

I die in such novel ways, that only
a brain glutted with sticky sleep

could devise: my teeth have the word
"OBITUARY" scrimshawed across them

as I dig myself a grave - my shovel
strikes colossal grandfather clocks

instead of rock and webbed root
in the wet black loam. The worst

feature my father, who vanishes
suddenly mid-sentence, leaving

behind a silence like old books
forgotten and dampstained

on yard sale tables, patiently
waiting for eyes or for fire.

Death: come, play chess with me,
as is your wont; wear Old Shuck

& twin me down the night streets -
anything but this, when I dread

the failure of evening coffee,
& slide unwilling into cold sheets.

To Meg Eden, after reading her book

Ugetsu - a shortening of u-sei-getsu, "A moon obscured by rainclouds"

There are towers of water standing
in the distance. They're waiting for us
to complete our denouement
before the fat, snapping rain drums
against the pebbled elephant skin
of street sick, slick with black petals.

Rain clouds obscure the moon,
headless, heedless, puffed out,
bruising wildly overhead
even as the veil comes loose.

We had this miraculous day,
as if nothing had changed.
You were still exactly yourself.
I missed your voice more than I knew.
Your keen eye, the same clever lens,
it held it all in, the same as before.

Your lovely, quiet soul...
I hardly know what to say;
I cried until my face ached
after you walked into the hotel.

Rare girl,
so full of life,
watch how
three cartwheels
of years pursue
you, for you
are born from
the shavings of
the sun's golden
flanks, from
crystal splinters
of full moon,
from dreaming
flakes of rain -
little pieces of
every day that
went missing
over three years,
sliding away
to assemble you,
on that
perfect day.

Those three years
will always lie
to you, tell you
your birthday is gone
when they have
bundled it away.

But they know
that every
fourth year
you will
come for it,
& you will
open the day
like a package,
& with a spoon
you will eat the
honeycomb of sun
that is your birthright,
the sweet milk of moon,
on dishes of rain.

You are so open
to the world
because you are
so much of it.

My face, knotted in the shopfront glass,
then smeared smooth, unfolding

in strangest waves and furls
until it's me again, the mask restored.

I do this several times. Step left,
I'm a minotaur, a funhouse scream,

a maze-horror, a twist and blink.
Step right, the pane straightens me

into a mid-life crisis.
But I can't help but wonder

if it's like a coat hanger:
once bent, never really true again;

the mirror regurgitates destinies
as casually as How Do You Do.

I wander down the walk and wonder
if my eye is still slivered and daubed

into a blanched, branched pool
of wild milk spoiling in the open air.

"Ghost cries out to ghost -
but who's afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
that start from my own feet."
-Theodore Roethke

It's true that each dark step
in the night-heavy hall
is given to the grave
in the air.  

But never, never accept
death's creaseless small,
cold palm. Be brave -
even a breath is a prayer.

Dublin
girl,
laugh
with me
into the
exploding
green
of trees
coming
into leaf
in this
fast angle
of city,
while
I ****
an hour
on this
bench full
of speech,
watching
night low
into lilac.

Empty dress on hanger's *****-arm
where is your mistress? See that I burn,
stoked by her absence, and burned words
wheel inside me. Dusk's rusting flood  
of lawn where once she stood is only
now a crisp green leaning shadow.
Without her I'm a thousand times tired...

Empty dress with your gauzy charm,
you hang with a ghostly turn
over a vacant ankle. Yet as you're stirred
in the air, hope presses my barking blood,
a spark and spur. Dress, don't be lonely,
she'll be back soon to reclaim us, though
our lives may seem to hang on wires.

Dearest E--,

At your name,
an inner empire went to grass -
there was no saving it.

The aftershocks were felt
for several hours:
wracks, throbs.

The ****** sun wouldn't stop,
bright gristle mounted on acromion,
though the afternoon was finished.

E--, you can't shave me away
with distance; I know it pains you,
so here is a compromise:

you will be adored, but so quietly,
so politely. See, I can be reasonable -
I won't even send this letter,

Though I Remain,
Always Yours,
Evan

"We three, we're all alone,
   [...] living in a memory,
   [...] my echo, my shadow and me."


Over in the corner
are your books,
stacked into the wall.
I like to be the mourner,
it seems. Long looks
at your bric-a-brac, at all
the things you left.
The night is perfectly cleft
into darkness and silence.

What else can I do,
but poison myself
with sentiment?

1980s,
America,
in a field.

I have a baseball,
and I'm throwing
& retrieving it.

At the edge of
the field is
a pine forest.

The forest is
unnaturally
still.

I'm afraid of it -
maybe it's
my subconscious,

maybe it's
death,
maybe it's just

the unknown.
Eventually,
I throw the ball

so deep
into the air,
a perfect arc,

that it enters
the forest's
edge. Slowly,

I go to find it.
Just inside
the forest

are strange
& hideous
snarls,

& then
something pushes
me down.

All the grass
in the field
turns black

in one moment.
The last thing
I see before the end

is the closing pines,
they're hungry,
so hungry.

When I'm feeling down,
you speak to me -
I almost drown
when I'm feeling down,
but black and brown
give way to jubilee,
for when I'm feeling down
you speak to me.

Your
light-
headed
morning
leaves me
anxious:
the mist
in the
air seems
impenetrable,
& the
sun is
forgotten
in a gray
pocket.

Getting
out, you're
searching
for baby's
building,
lace dress
in box's
paper
nestle.
You send
a picture
and I'm
liquid as
a tea light.

My
thoughts
follow
you,
step for
step.

A long
night of
mixing
memories
with
high-test
beer
fades me.
In the morning
the nephew
builds a fort,
abandons it
to run a
railway.
In an
act of god,
the rails
are crushed
with laughter.

I'd give
anything
to rise
from the
bottom of
this sea
of boxes
and take
your
temperature
with the
back of
my hand
against
your brow.

This opening world
is full of visible breath
curling over the blood house.
     I'm not in love anymore.

The air is crisp as bitters,
as spackled mud freezes
into rutted battlements.
     No, you haven't been.

Winter is a spill of grass
laced with sleet,
a quiet rind of snow.
     How long have you known?

A brittle red cloud
of sloey ice scatters
from a ginning curve.
     We should stop talking.

Domed salt vaults
rise by the highway
like a black dough.
     We can't keep doing this.

Drink winter down;
envelopes of night
are rapidly sealing.
     It's over, over.

This is life?
Starting the journey
with a rough beginning,
carrying a turning mind
within a sunsetted body,
some kind of a self.

And this is the self?
Carving through life,
carving through the body,
on the streaking journey
into the mind?
It's a beginning.

Or something like a beginning.
I'll pick up this self,
clean out this mind,
baptize a new life.
Go on a long journey,
remodel the body,

the aching body
right as it's beginning
to stray from the journey.
Guard the self
against life.
And the mind,

be careful with the mind,
more than even the body.
Because this wild life
is only the beginning.
The roles of the self
change so much on the journey.

No, plural - the journeys.
Likewise, the minds,
and the many selves
you'll have. The bodies,
the beginnings,
the lives.

Because the body and mind
are always beginning. The self
is a journey. That's life.

The moon's orange
like a rotten peach
crowded in a corner,
torn like wallpaper.

On the parapet,
etch my heart
into the air with
fading smoke.

Try to solve
the broken
code of stars.

Try to dissolve
the high miles
with *****.

Try to absolve
the gods that
made it this way.

Cinder-headed,
I swim smoked
tea until tongue's
angles of ash.

Marbling ache,
eyes threaded
with fever, skin
rides every last

avenue in the air.
Thoughts scatter,
ice diary desolate,
cinder-headed.

It's tempting
to restart history
with this nocturne
I play for you.

Let all the books be
an empire of cinder
swept away by an
indifferent breeze,
long diaries of ash
caught in the pines.

Your words, your kiss
will be the first on record.
We will write new volumes
in a ****** world.

But first let me finish
this nocturne I play
for you late, late
in the night.

Night, craftsman of lies,
crazy, imaginative, chimerical,
what do you show to the one
     who conquers the good in you?
the flat mountains and dry seas;

inhabitant of empty brains,
mechanic, philosopher, alchemist,
vile concealer, blind lynx,
afraid of your own echoes:

the shadow, the fear,
     the evil you are known by,
caring, poetic, sick, cold,
brave hands and fleeing feet.

Awake or asleep,
     half of my life belongs to you:
awake, I pay you with the day,
asleep, I don't feel what I live.

The sad old dracula
totters down Lamont,
smells like brandy.

White hair puffed
with talcum or flour,
last year's grease
paint blood running
mouth to chin, collar
turned out high,
swaying on heavy
feet among the happy
terror of children.

He sits on the curb,
falls asleep.

Who knows what
escape he sells
to himself, what
weight this dissolves?

A toddler leaves a fistful
of candy at his feet,
for him to enjoy when
the sun is thrown out
onto the street.

A ceremony
of sun in the

admitted eye.
The day drawing

away silently.
You, tempting

me with the
inviting

curve of
your cheek...

As you speak Turkish
to your sleeping hand
the sun raises pink
frequencies in
tremendous arches
through radioactive
lozenge clouds.
I adore you
helplessly as we
split circles of grace.
Citrus banners
break in the distance.
The lawn is forever.

This is our
first meeting.
In the impossible
whiteness of
the airport, you
appeared in my
arms, six hundred
pages of waiting
come blinking
to life. I have
discovered I cannot
ever kiss you
enough - the
fallow hush
of sky urges me
to drink you.

So I do.
My life opens
for you, deep
green slices.
You are the
same, and
this is our way.
Words silver
the citizen air.
Heat drips
down our
backs. Hearts
are crisp with
truth.

We're only two weeks away,
I can almost taste it.
The curtain rising on our play,
we're only two weeks away,
we'll hardly know what to say,
but we won't waste it -
we're only two weeks away,
I can almost taste it.

Go for a walk
in the unbroken
Saturday, the trees
sling themselves
at the upper blue,
the ash wall rustles
and the russet fawn noses
the cherry branch snarl.

A stillness about the hands,
near where the wasp
was singing. A stillness
on your side of the world,
where the new stars
are out roaming again.
A stillness broken when
the wind strums us
with its wild comb of fingers.

Dearest,

I sit with your plucked wildflowers,
in the near blue hours that ramble past
like a coach-and-four. You return
"upon the morrow” and I have said
your name aloud so often
it is thin as gold leaf.
Crow's speech marks the new day
under a gunmetal fog-dome
that slips spells in the sinking heat.
The gray river sidles along the city;
I'm out of time. I send my love.