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.

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.

My father left me
when I was four.
After that, I saw him
on weekends,
& discovered he filled
his coffee cups with bourbon
& sipped it all morning,
taming the demon day
while I watched the early shows,
                             insensate.

Now Dad is gone.
I am past forty.
The woman I thought I would love
long into the purple evening
has left me.
I fill my cups with Scotch
in the early mornings,
fail at meditation,
sip away the dead days,
the dead days.

Prepare well,
honey bird,
but don't dwell -
prepare well
for a spell
answering words.
Prepare well,
honey bird.

The sun sluices in -
the light just won't
stop breaking.
Birds are weeping
in trees full of dawn,
& poets run to the streets
to scribble out a heart.
The sun pulls away
from a neck of night.

Long morning
chopped with sleep
drifts into a long
afternoon, also
chopped with sleep.
Evening brings
similar promises.

Some Sundays
take you in the
teeth and never
let you go.

A day for a lonely
cigarette in the yard,
for looking into the
mirror and reassessing,
for watching the trees
waving each to each.

Not much else now
but to take the little
pills and wait
for tomorrow.

They buried an elephant
here, in 1922:

White and brown
wet and scattered
branches.

I heard it in the evening,
those sad, hopeful voices.
Astonished, I was caught
in a grace. I thought
of the strangest things:
Corso's leopard-apples
& lost watches,
flowers pressed into pages,
aluminum foil and how
once creased it's creased
forever, the scent of a pear,
the scent of hide glue,
astonished as these strange things
rioted through me
uncontrollably, as the music
moved forcefully forward,
however unfinished,
and I was stricken
with a nearly perfect moment.
Astonished, when you said
this was your funeral song.

Once I would
take a word,
like lake, and
use it to tell you
how I was afraid
of losing you
by hiding in
that word:

"I am under the wall of lake,
pressed thin as parchment
in the inhaling dark,
by the shape of where you were."

So what is there
to find in this poem?
The television's grit
and glow, by which
I mean I sit alone.
The frost in the glass,
by which I mean
I am thinking of you.
The fox in the snow,
by which I mean
I miss you terribly,
& I am not afraid
of saying so.

Though I always try,
I am not always a
creature of grace.

Sometimes I open the
same foolish veins
as everyone else.

I can look back
in sadness and anger
& feel like hell about it.  

One worry masquerades
as the other - hard
to tell them apart.

But once you've pulled
it together, at the bottom
are the unassailable truths.

It doesn't take grace
to know your heart,
only a hard-won trust.

There is always
a little uncertainty
& a little worry.

It always pays to be
alive and open to the
width of the world.

And, darling, there are
people like you
for whom it's all worth it.

Errant firework in the distance,
folding sun in a west bed.
The evening is dying, canceling
away in the purple shade.
I walk south, west, west,
until I'm on the mirrored water,
a new Narcissus in the valley,
among the rusted thighs of the city.

Everything is a memory of her;
the cocktails, the coffee, the sherry,
the faint scent of rosewater,
the long theater grass.
But now it's cleared away
by ice cream men and sirens
as far as the river steps,
the descent into the sunken palace.

An orange layer blankets the evening flow,
& the haunted asphalt is a black spine
of humid trees. She is gone,
but her outline remains everywhere.
Tonight I'll wander to the whisky bar
& buy forgetfulness.
A distant sky presses in;
this place is far from everything.

The moon comes double,
with a necklace of river.
It sighs and sighs
in black flakes of rain.

Red trees give us
mouthfuls of nocturnes,
like doves whistling
from the roof.

I am somewhere between
your waiting eye and
the slatish sky that
breaks away easy from
the office of rain that
withholds half a world.

I am something between
the passion of Yeats and
your passionate wait,
given to me across
the five hour sea,
full of firsts.

A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.
My puffball proud,
a valiant cloud
has been our shroud
against this fire spun.
A valiant cloud
defers a shouting sun.

Clouds in ginger
crowd the skin
& months grow out
while I become
an eschewing hermit
who rerolls nights.
Over in your
farther morning,
flight TK 1977
is sleeking to Dublin
on the same
bronzy sun that
sings in brick.

I've felt far
from you, lately -
distance deepens
in the swaying spaces
between your words.
Splitting goodnights
with a lonely axe,
I let my mind
run away with me.
Please, be here soon -
the moon is but
a sobbing blotch,
& the grass is dying
in its bed.

The night
closed and
my tears
floated the dark.

My body curled away
in betrayal,
unwilling to meet you,
and I hated it.

Anxiety rose
inside me
like an electric hum.
My face was a shine,
a gloss, a smear
that hovered.

Please,
look past
the beating blood.
This was never me.

The moon
is an anise thigh,
a frostling,
a silver galleon
with trimmed sail.

You are two hours
farther down the arc,
in a mountain-head,
in a waltz-walk,
in a sunroom
that the moon
has colonized.

Oh, the moon...
anise eye,
snow-wreath,
starched breast
aboard a silver galleon.

Swan swing or harp bridge,
by sunrise's purple finger
inside the azure waist.

City wakes broadcasting
red trees, shining pyramids,
vivid blossoms and vines.

The river's garbled mirror
under paint-crane chaperone
soon shows cerulean Christmas.

By the time hips of light
coalesce in the near-dawn,
you're gone - long since home.

My glass
is all ice and
cheap *****.

My eye drowns
with envy in
your clean kõlsch.

Neither of us
speak a word
about marriage.

How I miss you!
The rubber sun
just shines and shines
without you,
mute and meaningless.

It shrugs itself up
into the air,
lights the lawn,
and slowly pillows
down behind the Cairo
& other tall buildings.

Then the moon takes over,
pallid and slow.
It pulls itself into the evening,
inch by inch,
transfixing the dead park,
the silent pavement,
the empty cars.
Until morning breaks
the spell, and the moon
hides away behind
low blue plumes.

How I miss you!
The sun and moon
are no replacement.
They only remind me
of your rhythms,
your chest rising, falling,
the way you put a book down
before sleep takes you.
How I miss you!
You are the center
of things.

This murmur of moth wings,
this secret bed-shadow,
this slouching perfume of rain -
I am haunted.

I suffer these night-knots,
these irradiated musings
on your slow return,
these poems that face the corner.

Haunted men love strangely,
with hearts full of runaway horses,
hands full of cloud and sand,
and lips that repeat fugitive names.

Ancient rain still wreathes your hair, lingers,
unwilling to assume the mantle of air. I am flame,
I am July, ascending into strange worship.
Be careful even as you read this, your eye vulnerable
in the desert ruin of this page, each word entwined
with the quiet, holy book-scent.

N, was this an invitation to you? Bathed in the scent
of mint from soccer field gardens that lingers
despite twenty years of memorial rust, entwining
with your dark hair that flashes guttering flame.
Mint and hair our prophesy, but still vulnerable,
liable to dissolve. Let us by reading worship

the old poets; Lorca our hymnal. We’ll worship
as fervent heathens until no mint, no hair, no scent
of books can stop this ribbon river moment, invulnerable.
Old orbits decay invisibly but still we linger
in our mansions of hurt histories, cored by the flames.
I am reduced by degrees to a shadow, entwined

with a false animal made for the world, entwined
the way the barb is with the wire. Worship
is fading smoke crying nostalgically for flame,
is the intoxicating almond whose scent
bears the mystery of cyanide. Come, N, linger
in my world with me, so vain and vulnerable.

Savonarola burned away the vanities – wooden and vulnerable,
the crooked dice screamed. Playing cards entwined
with the illustrated pages of risqué books, a perverse worship,
a sacrifice that rose in pornographic ash and lingered
in the branches of midnight above charcoal Florence until the scent
collapsed soft as a sigh back into moraled flames.

N, perhaps you are the consuming flame
in this story. Am I your violin, varnish melting, vulnerable?
Or am I Savonarola, lighting the first match, the telltale scent
of match heads gambling in the breeze? We are entwined
in a new history. Come read with me. Worship
the blind hills of the sea. Their melancholy lingers.

Up the black, sticky stair,
break into the wet street
just before eleven; a girl
with lopped lilac bangs snarls
in profile while curling beams
seep from her cell.

I walk home, avoiding my reflection
in the shop windows, mumbling
the pine bird sermon I heard years ago,
when I was drifting drunk
in the fire yard, full of honey and ash,
bottles popping in the pit.

Let the night slide on -
let the black gull draw down -
The door closes so softly
on that old smile...
The sheets on the bed
grip me with soft, cold hands.

The cloud pulls apart,
a two-headed ripple
in a towering sepulcher
blue as a peacock.
I am a witness,
possibly the only one,
to this bright death.
This, then, is the memorial
of something that lived
as a waver in the upmost field
for just a few minutes,
slain by the unfaithful breeze.

Don't feel blue,
Melis dear -
there's so much to do.
Don't feel blue,
you'll see it through.
Sorrow will clear!
Don't feel blue,
Melis dear.

Brown bottle's weeping
in the summer evening -
following the lawns to  
Kansas Avenue,

the night limps in
on starry crutch
over a heady glaze of traffic
riding the asphalt beam.

A woman walks a parrot
in the circle, and children
skip to avoid stepping
on cracks.
  
Thready breeze, brick slants
follow me back
to the thin javelin
of Gallatin Street.

I was young, my hair
    covered my forehead.
I picked flowers,
    played by the door.

You were riding
    a bamboo horse,
jousting with plums
    among the benches.

We lived in Changgan,
    without dislike or suspicion.
I became your wife at 14,
    I was shy and unsmiling,

I felt walled-in, and I refused
    every one of your calls.
But at 15, I found myself laughing.
    I even willed our ashes together.

Now I was drowning, even
    as I threw my eyes to you.
By 16, you had traveled
    through gorges filled with rivers.

I heard nothing for five months,
    and monkeys cried from the sky.
Your footsteps by the door
    slowly filled with moss

too thick to sweep, and leaves
    dash away in autumn winds.
In August, yellowed butterflies
    arrive in pairs to the salt grass.

It hurts my heart to watch it.
    I can feel myself aging.
But sooner or later you must descend
    back through the river gorge.

Please write before you do -
    I will come and meet you
all the way by
    Long Wind Beach.

Drink with me,
at the Mexican restaurant
on the wharf that serves
mezcal with chili salt,
we'll talk about all the things
no one wants to talk about.  
The lost loves, the harsh
self-treatment, the way
you're recovering nicely.
I'll share oysters,
but I'll leave soon,
my mind full of her,
full of her, full of her.

I have seen strange things, Celalba:
clouds wrecking, runaway winds,
high towers bent to kiss their foundations,
the earth vomiting its very bowels;

hard bridges breaking like tender reeds,
prodigious streams, violent rivers,
waded poorly even with cleverness,
mountains poorly bridled;

the days of Noah, people high
in the tallest of the pines,
the most robust and skyward.

Shepherds, dogs, huts and cattle,
I saw floating, without form or life,
but I feared nothing but my misery.

Voices beyond
the window
promise rain
after dark.  

The sun hasn't
moved for days,
caught in a net
of ash.

Father's Day
caught me
off guard -
I find one
of his books,
just stand there
holding it.

Something catches
in the chest.
The dark breaks.

I think, softly,
Where are you?

Rain begins
stretching slowly.

"I'm in love,"
so I shrink the world
down to a fatality,
something you could
wring out with *******.
The atlas makes scrape sounds
as Europe folds in half;
North America offers
nothing but slippery pulp.
This green touches that green -
if only distance were like this,
reduced like a wine sauce,
Washington sidling to Dublin
like old friends at the bar,
while collapsed Atlantic
makes a blue U shape,
bent.

So this is fallout -
The trees are choking
with ghosts that hang
like windchimes
from each atomic bough.
This is the aftermath.
The steam has long
since escaped, the cores
are ruined settlements
that glow furious gloam.
We carry them
with us, hearts knock
beat to beat, churning
something heavy
that already hardens.
Angels decay.
Summer is columns
& columns of them
carelessly spilling
into the empty
cooling pond.
What happened
to us? Years went
wrestling by
into the abyss. Clawing
to the surface,
this is what is left.
The trees are coughing
with ghosts.
I take you
and place you
gently among them.

You are my music,
on this long Friday.
Colonies of love
rescind the distance.
Your chestnut eye
amid glen and grass.

The scent of fresh grass
is rich as music,
rich as a soft hazel eye
on a sun-stolen Friday.
What distance?
There is only this love,

this cascading love.
No lance of grass
can close the distance,
only the piano's music,
a flight of Fridays,
a caramel eye.

And that Turkish evil eye,
hidden away with love
until that Friday
I tasted the bitter grass
and heard tense music.
And you, in the distance...

What distance?
Your soft brown eye
is here, a type of music,
an immense love
laying in the grass
on a whistling Friday.

It's always a Friday
with long distances
tucked under grass.
Your beckoning eye,
brimming with love,
singing with such music...

Love has no distance -
This Friday I'll make music
in the grass of your eye.

When I am gone, the cat settles in
by the door, among the shoes,
guaranteed to see me first
when I've returned.

When you are away too long,
(& you have been away so long)
I dig in among all our words,
waiting for the sound of keys.

I laid there
for hours
and listened
to the rain,
unable to
sleep. It
dropped
in mild
lambent
waves all
down the
grass rail
and across
collars of
trees. The
street was
splotched
with wet
shadow.
Eventually,
I knew that
sleep would
not come for
me, I went
out as you
suggested.
The rain
truckled
down my
knee,
behind
my ear.
I felt it
assemble
on my face.
Standing
in the dark
buttons of
the yard,
I put my
hand on a
corner of
life, and
stood in the
water brow.
Clouds sank
like the
shoulders of
frigates.
I went back,
having
annexed
a dream.

I awoke,
I understood,
I took in the meaning of it,
the meaning of your right foot
victorious over your left,
The Cairo perched above Q street,
the creak of my knee on the stair.

I was awake,
I saw it all,
the piles of fog like white
mattresses after the rain,
the scent of tobacco in the night
after the screech of madness,
the too-proper-by-half letters
I received from you...

I am waking,
I am open to it,
to the secrets that you tell
on a night when you are drunk,
to the wells in your eyes,
to the way you hold a pen
when you are telling me
goodbye.

Fly home, my dear,
and love your life.
Until you're near
fly home, my dear,
don't veer,
but straight as a knife
fly home, my dear,
and love your life.

The carousel
of your voice...
It lifts me all
the way home.

My hands ache
with emptiness,
they are so used
to holding yours.

I hear our music,
set to the drum
of the rain. These
are the lyrics.

I am forever
fifteen with you,
I am under a spell,
I use sails of night

to come reach you
in dreams. You are
a gift. For you,
I poach eggs.

In this odd world
of valentines and
pine cones, you
are the heart of me.

Your halo combs
through the steam
trellis.  Old sprays
of Baltimore sugar
fan across the table
by a salt whisper.
The white steeple
of creamer with red
lamassu prowling
anchors the coffee
shop's Tuesday
crucible. I drink
mine cold as you
sketch the bustle.
When I leave for
the office, your art
eye is still tight
as a lens, amid
the brunette shots
of night-hearted
espresso, the cluck
of the businessmen,
and the steam tree
that wakes you away.

The broken symmetries
of the night...
You move,
I move.

You were in the green hill,
chatting with clouds;
I kept a bar open,
wrote you a ditty.

There are little rainings
everywhere tonight.
They slip down into the graves
across the street. It sets the mood.

But I need to get out,
walk the block,
shake this umbilical glass,
join a blind fog.

The moon threatens
to escape its sweater
of noctilucent cloud,
but we're not looking.

I miss you, dear sweet,
deep in my bones.
In the high city heat
I miss you, dear sweet.
May the hours retreat
when the wild wind moans -
I miss you, dear sweet,
deep in my bones.

You're the one
who fills my days with pleasure.
Under endless sun,
you're the one
whose joys run
without measure.
You're the one  
who fills my days with pleasure.

(After Lorca)

In the cloudy evening,
I was a heart, a heart.

I was ripe with song
when I was breaking.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

In the sleepless morning,
I was still myself, a heart.

The evening was ripe
with my voice, a song.

Oh, soul ... red soul,
the color of desire.

In January, sleep packed
its suitcase and left out the window.

I patrolled the rooms,
waiting for it to return.

I became friends
with the **** tin moon,

I found leaves of tears
inside pillow cases,

I sat with a flowering aloe.
Nothing brought sleep back,

not even the song I found
along my body in the broken bath,

not the poems that dripped
from my fingers after washing

with charcoal, not even
the green prayer of the couch.  

It was only when I rejected sleep
that it returned with laughter in its hand.

Lace curtains
of merlot
down the side
of my glass -
I saw that color earlier
in the fold of a
Madonna's gown.
I'll see it again,
when I close my eyes.

Blame the
wine for dreams
that fold into
forms. Blame it
for another salvo
of mistakes.  
In the seven hours
between us, I have
somehow found
every wrong step.

The Lyft
driver
looked
almost
exactly like
Post Malone.

He talked
for a
while
until he
realized
I was
choking
up,
spending
my last
efforts
keeping it
together.

When he
pulled over
I lost it.

"Hey man
it's cool, are you
OK?

I've been
there
it's going to be
alright.

Girl?
Yeah.

Hey man,
cry it out,
gotta get it out.

I'll get you home."

Frank takes another ****,
& ribbons of condos
emerge from the hills.
He leans into a rustle
of unwrapped rain,
waiting for it to slip off
so he can fly fish again
out at Michael's Mill.
He's been cooling heel
for hours, but he makes
a good point:
the river yields bluegill,
the kitchen table yields
bills come due.

You're gone again -
what should I expect?

The day breaks
& the flowers
are frozen
like enamel.

The morning shrug
of sun eats
my resolve entirely.

But what do I expect?
Your life is other steps
& I'm sentimental
if I think otherwise.

What do I need
from you?

I'll step back -
unsustained,
unfulfilled,
but patient.

I often wonder
if maybe I am
the only man
in Washington
calling his lover
in Istanbul.

These poems shriek
through the air,
shaking the line,
coursing through
systems of white,
silent satellites,
breath in the valleys
of our hands.

So when I tell you
that I love you,
the words fill
all the spaces
of the world
before they are
presented to you
on your page
of glass.

What now?
Even the doves
flocking at
the window
chide me
as I weep
for the six
week anchor
inside me.