Blue letters of rain
are waiting...
Reticent molecules,
why are they
unable to pierce
the gauzy tent
that's vaulted up there,
gray and sick?
Caught by the elbow
on the way out the door,
living in a cloud's foyer -
don't they see
my hands moving,
filled with keys?
What silver seed
are they waiting for now?
Blue letters of rain,
sleeping in a sky
dark as a bandage,
the air is so heavy,
so metallic; the whole
city is waiting
for this wet birth...

The falsetto
"no no no"
shot down
the steepled
maple *****
into the walking line
by the metro.

How someone
got up there
we never knew, or
what made them yell.

I remember only
that the sky
was littered
with the wrecks
of clouds, and
it was a Friday
in winter.

We all stopped,
though we
saw nothing,
& then
it was over.

The grass
waved away
the watery
minutes,
& the sun
rolled loose
among the wrecks
in the blue ditch.

So we towered
over red tile
on the metro
platform,
hands heavy
with phones,
until the train
obliterated us
with its urgency.

Dad's college
favorite, he
screened it
for me in
the leaning
half-house
he rented.

The camera tilts,
searching for god,
finding only the
empty parentheses
of clouds, the iron
silence of ovens.
Famously,
the knight plays
chess against death -
god may be quiet,
but death is happy
enough to chat.

At the end,
the unbroken
line of the dead
dances up the hill,
inscrutable.
My dad drinks
bourbon from a
coffee cup,
old wet sting,
his thoughts
pulled in
like oars.

The suicidal hospital
floats away
into the past -
paper gowns
& abject beeps
& red-eyed
streetlamps
all turn into
valentines,
sugar silhouettes.

Being kicked
in my unfaithful face
while donating
my guts to the john
after too much
goodbye tequila?
Gone like a skip -
take a pattern
from my
better thoughts
& drag the
needle across
until I only
remember the yard
where I ate grass
& the air
was cruising
with the perfume
of hyacinths.

The woman who
left her ball gown
on the hook
behind my door
for months
after we fell apart?
No, keep her,
let her stay.
I need the bitter
to remind me
what the sweet is.

i.
Sew the sun
into you.
Let them
all complain
about your
radiance.

ii.
The sun
replaces
your heart.
Let them
try to break
it now.

iii.
The sun
is plural,
doubled
in your eyes.
Let them
worry about
the yellows.

iv.
Chew the sun
in the evening.
Let them
moan about
the bite marks.

v.
Fold the sun
into your poems
like a blind seed.
Let them
grow anxious
as the words come.

vi.
The sun shines
on the Seven
Hour City.
Let them
find it,
if they can.

vii.
Rescue the sun
from the brown
shackles of
cloud.
Let them
shield their
rain-dimmed
eyes in
surprise.

viii.
Hide the
sun in
a dune.
Let them
discover
night.

xi.
The family
of the sun
comes to
visit you.
Spread
the table
wide.
Let them
all peek
through
the windows.

x.
You
& and
the sun
strut in
the sky.
Let them
watch and
cry about
the arrogance.

The wound only shows
when the body is sleeping,
in the mind, in the nightmare
where ink drops from the desk
& splashes across the floor
in the shape of his face
though he's been dead
for years. It's a blow,
a reminder of the grave
in the air: this wound
never closes, there is no scar,
& sometimes no memory
when the nightmare closes
itself as a raven's wing,
more black ink folding in.

The wound only shows
when the body is sleeping,
so coffee is the sword
& the shield.
Keep sleep short,
don't dream,
& don't think about it,
just sit still, read
the newspaper you stole
from the building's front step.
The Dow is down,
but tech stocks are climbing.

Went to the
therapist drunk,
a blonde Wednesday
of rain corsets,
redding leaves,
cloud dough.
I remember the
syrupped anger,
distilled from
child's blood,
dripping on the
therapist's shoes.

Late afternoon
floating avenue,
apology of grass,
little pushes.
She was waiting
in the shaking
shadow.
This time
I had some kind
of self-regard.

Orange buttons
of repetitive sun
crush up against
thin folded dresses
of blued cloud:
You send me
earnest self-portraits
& my cantilevered
eye is oh-so-yours.

The sunset strides
one more chestnut
step, and I remember
how you laughed
when your shirt
parted for my
tickling hand:
even the moon
was up on its toes
hoping to see
the bright heave
& glow of your skin.

There is no night
                 without your name.
The day suffers too,
but limps along
on a swan's wing.

There is still much
                 to do
before you fly in,
but if we need anything,
it's ours.

When I ask
                 how you've been
write me a book -
your hours
are always new.

So give me that
                 laughing look,
for I belong
only to you -
there is no night
                 without your name.

As a child I'd run
slashing through lawn,
a green noose drawn
under butter sun.
I remember eating
belladonna at six,
black berries picked
under fence's fleeting
shadow by the square
of grass. I ate a pair,
and didn't go mad
more than I had
been. No one knew -
except now you.

There is a line
from me to you.
It straddles
the salt **** of sea,
the starry marrow
of night air,
the pencil shavings
about your ankles.
It threads through
castles of romance
I built in another time,
the courtyard littered
with lost scarves.
The line spans
thousands of girdled
miles without effort,
yet it touches you
questioningly,
and lays down
like a stray cat.
Go ahead,
it's yours,
take it.

April is poured
from oak barrels
until I'm dipso.
The last winter
stars pacific,
crawling,
humid jewelry -
scrape velvet
over this cheap bed.

Happy dream
of the late
night metro,
each sleeping face
silver and serene.
The air
conditioning leans
across the aisle
as if to whisper
something.

Endorphins rush
these frays
of nerve
like an infantry.
Sleep must come
on wings
of whiskey
that ****** forward,
swimming
in the dark.

I walk at night
just to walk.
By dim streetlight
I walk at night.
From city's height
to the river dock -
I walk at night
just to walk.

Lancing sun
in a wilderness of
roiled stratus -
a day begins
under threat of rain.

A stalking heart
crawling the high grass
searches for you.

I've made hundreds of
searches for you,
crawling in the high grass,
a stalking heart
under threat of rain.

A day begins:
Roiled stratus
in a wilderness of
lancing sun.

Go, visit home -
but come back to me.
To Europe's end you roam:
go, visit home,
my little honeycomb,
and be free.
Go, visit home -
but come back to me.

Talk to you
soon, by the river;
forgive me.

Or don't -
either way the children
will carry cheap burning sticks
around the August night.

Watching a **** elm tree
on your birthday,
as it bends and whistles
to inaugurate the afternoon.
The grasses bend south,
& birds make silent shadows
up and down the street.

Restless, I stand up,
roam around the apartment:
your birthday carries the odor
of fig soap, or maybe it's plums -
I can't recall. I pick up books
of poetry, put them down,
pick them up again,
turn on the stove, make coffee,
and wave it at the naked elm
to salute you on this day of yours.

This day - so clear,
so empty: you must fill it.

The old light of the stars
is brittle to breaking
under tonight's deserted curve.
My thoughts slur away...

Wishes wheel out
over the tree line
while radio eyes
hush to the dial.

Cars keep their grip
on the dying street -
my thoughts fracture...
I'm telling you - it still hurts.

There was your soul,
right in the heart
of the rain.
It fell home,
a runaway blue,
it gave you a look,

the kind of look
you'd expect from a soul:
deep cerulean blue,
a proposal of heart.
The look followed you home,
long after the rain...

Well, it can't always rain.
Return the look,
& bring it home,
the little soul.
Have heart,
and don't feel blue.

If you do drop blue,
or should it come rain,
fill the sail of the heart
with this new look.
Feed your soul
with a bite of this home.

Yes, ramble home,
long over the blue,
with a shine of soul
unscathed by rain.
It now gives a different look,
that won't pierce the heart.

Your sweet heart,
so happy at home,
absorbs these looks
I send. Sky's blue,
no break of rain...
a caress of the soul.

Look homeward:
still no bluing rain,
just heart and soul.

I'm alone in my room.
There is a green-skinned lamp
casting a level wave
onto an orange cat.

Bourbon, on the rocks,
waits in a shallow brown shadow.
The open window
is a breezy mumble.  

Peerless girl,
come inhabit all the sweet spaces
of my slowest imagining
with your light and wild step.

I was thinking of you,
watching green oxide stone
resist the rain
on a broken Sunday
when the groins of trees
trembled in the breeze,
& the sky lacked
all confidence,
five days until
the metal snout
carried me off,
away from a dawn yard
of bread brick, and
towards the one-wing bridge
& your greenest wave.

We are unfit
for these lives
as we lead them;
betrayed, moon-sick,
palmfuls of our pills
getting washed down
with the cheap wine
we hide under the sinks;
even the streets
are depressed
under the vinyl sun
with a lion's mane
of cloud, anxious
in the passing;
I don't know
what life I would shape
for you to make you happy,
but it wouldn't look
anything like this one.

A branching chime curls
into a hanging chain
of grayish rain.
The neighbors extinguish
all their yellows,
placing the winter
back in a black relief.
I'm leaving tomorrow,
off into the marrow
of the world, to see her,
to step into the unwritten;
nothing can slow me -
on my way to the quay
I'll throw over a river.

White tongue of ginger,
black tongue of coffee,
& morning limps in
at 6 a.m., hiding between
the pages of blue books.
I'm under a memorial,
across five meridians,
fifty-five hundred kilometers.
My hands hope to drift
under the knit peach,
& I love you with both lips.
White tongue of lemon,
black tongue of cardamom.

The ocean
divides
& divides
between us,
the water
never
content with
the shape
of itself.

Thoughts
divide
& divide
within me,
patterns
of distance
with you
at the center.

I know that
you can never love me.

But even so,
the glove of evening
slides off as you approach.

So many have tried
this comb - and now you,
the man on the horse.

My lips starve to feel
more than the air
around the sound of your name.

I love you,
my dear.
I tell it true:
I love you
every day anew.
Let them all hear:
I love you,
my dear.

Shavings of cloud
drop like cut hair
and brush my face.

Snow is plowed,
the street is flayed
and thrown with salt.

District sleet is like lace,
a wet veil, a noose,
more not there than there.

There's a grave in the air,
it's filled with my father.
My heart turns to water,

it just breaks loose -
it's nobody's fault.

On this red rug
the memories come:
the driving angels of meat,
the ocean yanked
around by the cue-moon,
the antler of sleep
that hummed past,  
the bar-room mystery
that was never solved
on a cold night when I
was about twenty-five.

Someday all of these
memories will fall away
into the crevasse
of my death.

Until then, all I can do
is bring them here
and give them to you -
as an offering,
as a plea.

There are those children
out your window again,
but I'm trapped over the line
in the seething yellow dusk.

I count the gapped lintels
the next building over,
count to ten, twenty,
it doesn't stand.

I take up post
by the oven to hear
your anger at those children,
those ****** children.

Lay a shadow on me -
we sleep overlapped
with the night-bells,
the thieves in the pines,
the crescent wine,
mothers-of-pearl.

Lay a shadow on me -
your sun's waist
rises while my dreams
are still marching
across my forehead.

Once, I thought
I had an empire,
full of ecstasies of grass,
temples to an obese sun,
words signed away
into the last corners
of the brickish night.

I had such grand plans,
to put death to death,
but soon all the heavens
of love coagulated.
Ghosts without eyelids
or lips followed me,
registering each sin.
An owl scratched at the moon.

This was the state you found me in -
I staggered around, alone,
scratching out my brutish art.
For you, though, I combed my soul
& yielded to the burning mercies
you offered among the knees of trees.
You cured me with sugar and patience;
I lived in your eyes.

I am your own poet, now,
lacing you into my middle age,
howling at this strange gamble
that closed a distance,
& falling into your arms
as often as possible.

I'm burning beside you,
trying to quiet
my hurt mouth-sounds.

Get up and search for honey
in the back of the cabinet,
cursing all the while.

Is this one of those
moments when someone
is about to leave me,

gathering their things
& inching toward
the proverbial door?

Go outside - count stars -
have a panic attack -
breathe, breathe -

catch fire and burn.
If I make it to bedtime,
it'll be a mercy.

The stars all come out at once,
like whipping a sheet off a bed.

A crowd of silver
floats in the moon's broth,

& approaching apples of light
break away from the black hoof,

the flooding vein,
ten thousand irises.

My eye's choir
garbles the sway
swung from your sun's
dying orange angle.

Yes, Saturn's higher
on the belted tray
of stars, softly done:
we're entangled,

you and I.
If I'm a bird,
you're the wings,

though your thighs
eat all my words,
in their long dark strings.

Hold my hand,
and don't let go.
Heart's demand,
hold my hand,
something grand,
sweet hello.
Hold my hand,
and don't let go.

Evening yellow,
sun purple plum.
I'm grieving your
absence under
sheet cloud.
Trumpets of night
are moaning,
tomorrow molten.
Kansas Avenue
collapsed into the
center of the earth,
but it's alright.
Here is the Bible
Study school, here
a slip of children,
here is the parish
of weeds binding
corner green.
Everything seems
assembled for you:
you've changed me.

She lives on the verge
of a wood where the shy deer stand in
raining glades, and sunken trees
unroll knotted shadows in the long
hour of the ******* sunset.

Her face is in my yearbook,
so serious, in the first row
of the literary club group picture.

I'm in the third row
looking stupidly away
from the camera,
missing the moment -
could that boy in the photo
call out over twenty years and say
"The fists of rain, the speckled deer,
the branching, shaded fog peeling
away as the dogs run in the morning -
these things are yours, yours, yours"?

I  always want you
to know who I am.
When the driving pink days
collapse into anxiety,
& the restless fountain nights
flood the streets
with gray shadows,
there I am, over the keys,
writing to you.
I'm the one who gives you -
across the sea, star to star -
something that you and
you alone can redeem.

The sea slides
away. Fog
banks the high
tide and lakes
wrap the
highway.

You are the
specter in
my mind.
Garnet
laughter
rings out
in the house
of sand -
it's yours.

I stay up
late, branded
with sea.
I think you
are the grace
of the world.
The beach
swerves into
umber mist,
& an absent sun
hums just below
the horizon.

Without you,
the night-walk
is so hollow.
Without you,
the cigarettes
burn in rooms
of rain.
Without you,
the shells
are striped
with longing.
My balcony
heart perches
above the salt
city.

How many
days will
the fog bank
the high tide
& lakes wrap
the highway?
How long
will the sea
slide away?

I stand here,
cut from flight,
shaped by love.
You hold branches
of mulled wine
by the black milk river.
The blue and gold
of your soul
nestles in the sleep
of my eye.

Come see the dead clocks,
between the blocks of sickness
& the giant silent ****.
You must remember
what you gave me,
that last coarse night
when we were so hungry -
bring it with you,
even if it's raining.

I keep my visions
to myself.
You never approved.
The day leaks
onto the tusks of night,
the night tries itself out
onto the street of day.
Visions drift away
into the closer hills.
You never approved.

The last shadow will close my eyes
     and take the white day from me,
and unbind my soul from lies and flattery
     so that it can find its way;

but my soul won't leave its memory
     of love there on the shore where it burned:
the flame that swims cold waters
     and has no respect for the severest laws.

My soul, that a god made a prison for,
my veins, that have braided fire,
my marrow, which scorched in glory,

will leave this body but not this desire;
they will be ash, but that ash will feel.
They will be dust, but that dust will love.

Crinkles of steam
unfold from my golden coffee
into pyramids of air.

Just beyond, the television
radiates in rectangles
of submission.

3000 miles away, you sit
in your pajamas, watching
with me, linked.

Everything is sending signals,
if you know how to look.

I.

The washing moon
over evergreens
plucks needling rain:
unsleeping, you rise
& flip through a few pages
although your mind
anchors elsewhere.

II.

Driving home,
you see small birds
whipping into the afternoon
on the line to green,
although your mind
has turned inward
like the stone in a cherry.

The leaf drifts
to a green grave.

The soft run of sun
spreads red in the hand.

Angles descend
white into bronze.

Where are you?
You break my symmetry.

All these engravings
in a wing-wax afternoon

are hollow
in your persistent absence.

A club of sun
down Upshur St
breaks our talk
of pink noise.

Interrupted quilts
of cloud are shyly
unlaced in the stillness
of the afternoon.

I turn your face
toward the green
tunnel of park,
but you're not looking.

Come and cure me,
if you can,
vertical man:

there's ice in the glass,
& rain-blacked grass,
as if by plan,

& a loosened sea
is a sad blue band -
this horizontal man

needs your cure,
Dr. A'Bunadh,
so don't detour.

I'm always being born -
even this morning,
when I was thinking
too hard about it,
curing myself at 8:30
with scotch that reeked
of dense iodine
until a bray of laughter
became a choke
as I returned to the scene
of the ******,
pushing a belly of snow
back into the past;

I'm always being born,
blinking in surprise,
drawing this breath,
instinctively turning to you.