You'll tell me that
you hate this
neighborhood,
& the midnight

adventures
I had years ago
down Dahlia St
& Georgia Ave

will strip away,
thin, ******.
I'll notice
the broken walk,

the dead grass,
the trash gathered
in the raw verge,
I'll be embarrassed.

You'll be unhappy
in the new place
you're in, and
I understand but

I won't be able
to reach you.
I'll have learned
by then to shut up,

grip the air on the
silent street, take
some steps back,
let you have

your thoughts.
I won't be able
to save this situation
with magic words

said perfectly
in a pentangle.
I won't be able to
rescue you from

this drift, I'll
only be a tether,
a hand across
the void.

It'll all be new
and foreign
and everywhere is
a walk in the sun.

Washington summer
will be a hanging heat.
Soon I'll chauffeur
you into the slots

of the city, but I'll know
that won't salve
your feelings.
I won't do anything

but walk by your side
until it all ebbs.
Under the radio
tower in this poor

neighborhood
I knew so well,
I'll still my tongue.
I'll step through

the weeds to the home
where I'll hope
you will maybe find
something yours.

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.

You are the passing shadow in the lavender,
the new wet leaf on the budded branch.

You sweep the year away again,
the morning ploughed blue to yellow.

Low tide grips and goes,
a seethe of chilled salt and muddy mist.

What remains is a breeze:
your cotton sleeve sun-speckled.

I send you this verse
as a mourning dove lifts

its black penny eye
under strings of evening,

& sings a falling song
cheek to cheek with the glass.

i.
Your names
are a sudden
throb on
the tongue.

ii.
Your names
are a beachhead,
and the splitting
tide across it.

iii.
Your names
are diaries,
secret days
of ash and ink.

iv.
Your names
are the green
vocabularies
of the branches.

v.
Your names
are a shock
of gin in the
back of the throat.

vi.
Your names
are vespertine,
a soft song
in the evening.

vii.
Your names
are a corsage
of ether around
the wrist.

viii.
Your names
are an antidote
to the long,
long day.

ix.
Your names
are dreams,
mirages that
divide and rise.

x.
Your names
are the dark
brick fork
in my lane.

My cubist
face looks out
the window at a
moon wrestling
sinuous blackish
clouds that fling
welting scales of
rain in little belts.

My face enjambs
like these lines,
& I catch sight of
the cloud basin
climbing higher
& higher into
the upper champagne
of the atmosphere,
clouds the same
shade as dull teeth
in a wet mouth.

The angles of
my jaw -
cameras fail
to distill it.
Or I am so full
of wild will
that no one
notices my face
is a trompe l'oeil.
In this pale light
I'm all cheek
and brow-
another bottle
of wine and I
can smear my
own memory of it.  

The clouds
I mentioned, they
fell one by one
into the Anacostia
river, never to be
seen again.

Glass-faced men preen
in high-polished chestnut,

affixed to a serene Medusa
with green-sunned fingers

that erupt from hive-eye blonde,
biting hearts down to their pits.

Green shirts drift up and down
the steep stair as razors of beer

shave us one and all, lathered
in tight heads of Guinness.

"All men **** the thing they love,"
shouts Medusa, reading aloud

from the depths of her purse
to her ****** and adoring date,

"give me your kiss, your sword,"
her words like ivy on old bells.

Not to be outdone, Brian turns,
looking like he's been here since

last night at least, and cries
"A drunkard is a dead man!

& all dead men are drunk."
Medusa is too busy kissing,

but we raise our glass hands,
exiled from heaven and hell,

slouching toward Tuesday,
& toast him from our graves.

Bittersweet,
this leaving.
It may have
turned a little,
but it was always
underneath you,
a comfort.

Still, your
blissed heart
is filled with
butterfly wings,
& the book-edge
horizon beckons
with sunrises:

You'll go east,
to friends who
can intuit the
new green spaces
growing inside you.
Tell them
       everything.


I will be waiting,
the face that
adores you,
like a prince
trapped in
a mirror,
restless to come
& enter the
world of hands
and lips -
& whispers that
ignore the ear
& dive straight
to the castle
of the soul.

In for a penny, in for a pound,
just throw the cork away:

the glass is filled until we're drowned.
With murmur and rumor we pray,

dreams mantling like thorn-crowns.
How much could two souls weigh...?

More than a feather. Well, together we're bound,
& together we'll stay.

Who'll buy the next round?
Pint-hands are cold and mottled as clay,

their faces spinning lost and found:
can't win if we don't play.

When the hour comes round,
there's a bill to be paid

before sleep seeps from the ground
like steam... No, lover, this way -

come sever the spine of the town
with me, two fraying strays

riding each other all the way down,
eyes flat and cold as old ashtrays.

We were the shining ones.
Our bottles never broke,
coffee was always at
full steam. My perfect
memory pulled at the
hair of time. Your wrist
tattoo sighed in the sheets.
The bed ached. The sun
was a press. We were the
shining ones, to be sure.

But then you were called
back to the green. I watched
your plane. I dropped throbs.
My heart was broken harp
strings. There was fever
crying in my hands.

But you will be back.
You'll cross the hems of
the world. I'll hold you
again in the sweet of
the night. You'll draw me.
Your paintings will sing
Hallelujahs from the walls.
The moon will moan glory
from its lonely sconce.
We'll be flooded
with reunion.

In the emptiness of my
father's birthday the
year after he died

I'm picking up my girlfriend
at the airport, and July
is a singing bed of trees.

A giant shadow roams
through my mind. Birds
slash in a surging field.

How is he gone?
I feel things slide
away from me,

memorials in the air,
when I confront
the gear of absence.

I drink from his favorite
coffee cup - "Key West,
A New Slant on Life."

I invoke him in so
many ways but the
shadow still moves.

The sixth of July
arrives and departs
in nails of heat,

& new faces draw
the sting away
from missing ones.

Myrtle grows wild,
white moon bells,
blood blossoms -

I trap these things
inside his old
Nikomat camera

as the day arches
its back to let
the shadow by.

This is for Liz, who once sat down with me
& spoke of terrible but necessary things.
Her eyes browsed me and I paled:
she locked our minds together
to make sure I understood
exactly what she meant.
Liz died last Saturday.
In our joint years of poetry
(filled with unexpected stings
that left our arms in gooseflesh braille
'til she digressed to dogs and leather)
she taught me this: that sorrows should
be shared - cultivate them, let them ferment -
so we could drink them down like Cabernet.

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."

Umber hillsides tumble
steeply into leaf, pine steeple
vault and nave, brook vale
dim to hush, branch dam
licks dusk, red lake
drains to night, tight-drawn.

We lunch on dust.
We wake, wage our campaigns

of mistakes across a quiet,
wary, unwaving old world.

No greeting, no parting,
no arriving, no leaving -

we are jabs in the air,
crudely curbed animal feints,

& then our names are packed away
& left forgotten in a taxi,

or in a train station bathroom,
or in a fray of rain.

Don't think too hard about it;
that, too, is a mistake.

You punctured my heart
   with your name -
      you had my full attention.

With irises black and sleek
   as limousines you passed
      my soul's guardhouse
         & entered the grounds
             unannounced.

But you were like Baba Yaga,
   cruel almost by accident,
      tongue of threat and spell,
          your achtung heart
              curling inward,
                 filled with teeth.

With a pestle of words
   you ground me away.

She said she got out of bed with me
feeling halved, as if something was removed

during the night. She called us the zeroes
in the hundred, with the world our one:

we got kicked from bar after bar
when she blew up at me, threw pints

& chairs, and then later we'd make up in bed
until we were both crying from the toll.

Friends would pull us each aside
& whisper warnings, ask if we were sure

this was what we wanted (of course not,
but in for a penny in for a pound).

In NYC at the old pine bar on my birthday
she got so drunk she fell from the bar stool

& sobbed on the floor that no one loved her:
"You should save her, even if you can't

save yourself," said the old devil
conjured when I was 4, still there at 29;

I listened as it made secret promises of love
in exchange for burnt offerings, broken meat.

I remember the slip of her hand in mine
while she stepped around a tarnished

subway grating for fear she'd fall through
& be lost to the stone: "That's it," she said,

"that's my worst nightmare down there -
to be all alone, hurt, crying out from a well,

crying from the dark, the wet dark,
to be in a place where no one gets rescued."

A quartet has lulled me
to sleep this week:
Ardbeg, Bowmore,
Talisker, Laphroaig.

I'm holding this in,
living coughing strings
of days oh so carefully.

Walking home
through the drowning
grove in the sunken park,
I vacillate like a nurse's hand
choosing veins. Either way,
blood is coming,
with a blooming bruise.

My particular curse,
falling into these affairs
that end up straitjacketing me,
choosing the wrong things.
I need someone who'll reach,
but narrowly, narrowly.

In a photo
a man is
lighting
his
cigarette
in a
grain of
shadow,
his face
just for
a moment
caught
on a
hook of
light.

It could
be anywhere.
Maybe
even
this city,
clad in
green
squares
& stone
circles,
whose
soft
evening
runs
like yolk
into night.

Then
in another
photograph
I saw
the
hallelujah
of your
face.

I forgot
the
speckled
city,
I forgot
the man
& his
vine
of light.
My own
name
seemed
drunk
with you,
lost in
the wine
of your
talent.

Some
things
are
branded
on the
inside
of your
skin
forever:
the taste
of milk
or mint,
the raw
flower
of ***,
the slow
sacrifice
of the
candle,
a first
love,
& a last
love.

Darling,
turn me
inside out
& sign
your name
with fire.

Those first Thursdays you were ringless -
we were cloud-shares with starry bearings,
lakes of mercury eeling under our skins,
small moon-screens in our palms.

And then, on that nervy warm nightwalk
when I was about to ask you to coffee,
you pricked the air and felt me leaning:
Ah... you're married, ten years now.

Flirtations wilt into aches.
Yet even now, as you wing away,
a streetlight's encore sprays pinked spangles,
& storybook trees are shushly budding.

The rain comes and goes.
Ribs and thews pull into a heart,
even as the evening pulls apart
with a bird's telephone step.

My mother and I are
knee-deep in my
late father's storage
unit, which is filled
to the joists with
old math textbooks.

I scrape away the dust,
strange names emerge:
   numerical analysis,
      combinatorics,
         steganography,
             astrophysics,
                 number theory.

We don't understand
even a single page,
we decide it feels
fine to donate them,
the entire collection -
how many years did
we watch these books
decay on his shelves?
If there was a favorite,
he never told us.

Yet what a surreal act,
to thread steps into
this aluminum room
filled with the very
last of his things,
& collect these
books that I often
thought were almost
holy, filled with the
sigmas and matrices
of his high religion,
& now they're just
dust and weight,
                             dust and weight.

Dear H-----,

We were such a scandal -
in their schooling mouths

our names were broiled to ash
by raw rumor and we reveled in it.

We blitzed your blonde bedroom
naked and sugared with sweet steam

& reciprocal obsession.
Each night was a fresh first date,

we measured each other with miles,
with syrup sorceries, with dizzy eyes,

until we crashed under beetle-brow
linen piles, romance shooting inside us

as the rain pooled in drum slopes
on the clay court outside the window.  

But it couldn't last. You were sailing
into harbors of high privilege,

a world of guest rooms where
I had no station. When your sister

played the green glass game with me
in your mom's kitchen she hinted

at clouded designs of friction.
She was right - when Oma died

you retreated into verdigris,
atoms decayed into smaller atoms,

& we slowed and watched in wonder
at ghost-flurries of new spring between us.

It was done, but I miss you nonetheless,
& send my best; yours, Evan.

We'll be seven
hours apart
& heaven
for poor Evan

is across the chart.
I already feel
love's dart
transfix my heart.

But night's wheel
goes by,
& day's repeal
undoes the seal

& soon we will tie
our voices tight.
I send a lullaby,
carried with a sigh.

Battle day,
bottle night,

shrug the pills,
eat the light,

wrist of stars,
dripping yellow,

garbled sway,
muting fight,

madeira rill,
salt pier height,

wet ring bar,
moon's bellow.

The following is an account of
expenses in connection
with the Underwood investigation.

Expense account item #1:
$24, cab fare to your office.
Case of Jane Underwood,

Seattle, not seen
the last eight days.
Insurance policy on

her: $10 million.
I took the case.
I cocked my hat

low over my eyes,
cigarette behind the ear.
Expense account item #2:

$322.74, airfare to Seattle.
I interviewed the family,
the friends, the husband -

they all had alibis -
& also the man
she was seeing on the sly.

Expense account item #3:
$33.08, two packs of cigarettes,
a pack of gum, and a beer

at the neighborhood bar
where I watched Jake Wilson -
the Other Man in the picture.

Expense account item #4:
$29.90, cab fare from the hospital
where Wilson just gave it up.

I found him folded under
a neon sign by a cheap hotel.
I didn't see where the shots came from.

Someone wants Underwood
the stay missing, very missing.
Expense account item #5:

$120, a new coat, the old one
has bullet holes. More close calls.
Digging around, I learn

Wilson was knee deep
in counterfeiting Franklins.
Crowbar to the basement door

of the house he was renting
under a different name,
I found the missing woman,

cuffed to a radiator, mostly fine.
She found out about the funny money,
threatened to go to the cops

unless Wilson cut her in.
She was over her head.
But then - so was I -

who shot Wilson?
Expense account item #6:
$75, marriage license, King County.

Jane Underwood and I are
running away together
with the bad hundreds.

Time to end one of these
stories the easy way.
Tired of Hartford,

tired of heart's noir,
consider me retired.
But then, holding her hand

driving to Los Angeles,
her purse falls open
& the gun that killed Wilson

falls into the footwell.
It was all a setup. It always is.
Her hand gets cold, tight,

real tight. The ride
is about to get... difficult.
If only she knew, if only she knew

how many times I'd seen this
twist, how many women,
how many guns, how many

Wilsons had fallen to the ground
under how many cheap
blinking blue broken neon signs.

Machine riot pink
stone light sails
velvet bay blink.

Ice lynx ink
black trunk rails
machine riot pink.

Jade earl sink
shyly arc pails
velvet bay blink.

Chair hollow think
hint blinded gales
machine riot pink.

Reverse zip drink
plum brass wails
velvet bay blink.

White mint sync
bright pint hails
machine riot pink
velvet bay blink.

The early blurry dark tar drape,
the annihilating television sky -
under it, we're drifting floes

in a snow-veined river as winter
shadows slum through a beetle-browed
rowhouse valley, all the stars frozen

& ****** away by slow and humid glow.
Tomorrow's rain belongs to tomorrow -
tonight's pattern is hot and pink,

like something simmering just underneath
tautly-sheeted strokes of skin.
Must all our poisons be so sweet?

O Irish
girl, here
is a dream
of old
Furies
adrift in
the young
night,

arrogant
and
swift
as the
swans
that swim
the canal
out your
window.

The sun
pulled your
plane across
the petals
of sea.
On afternoon's
blossom
you're here,
two months
of waiting
fulfilled
by two silver
lines.

Come,
and be my
Renaissance -
share the gift
of your mind
over a cup
of strong coffee,
and talk,
just talk.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day
-Lord Byron, "Darkness"


Eater of broken meats
touching the night skin:
an ebb and flow of rain
scolds the window.

My skin bursts with olive slivers
with no hand to calm it in the morning.
Scalpel water from the white basin
glistens on a lip tatter.

The moon is failing.
Crude isolate breath
hums above the bud-elm.
Young drunks are wailing

as they hug one another,
twinned by the street flicker.
I succumb to sleep's disease
with your book still in my hand.

I fill a prehistorically stained blue seat
as we pull left down Florida Avenue.

In a black pyramid of oversized shirt
a woman spreads gospel from hands

heavy with speaker cones, the chorus
warning all unmarried womens

to look out, look out for the devil.
A man two seats ahead stares out

into blurred spring-raised dusk,
shudders inwardly, cupped with fever -

the college girl who chanced herself
beside him fishes with a worried eye,

edges a thigh into silver aisle air.
Four kids without parents field

strange questions from an old drunk:
"You kids like watching cartoons?

You like them cartoons where pants
fall down and you see some ***?

I know I do" until the oldest brother
huddles them off the bus with a look

cold and hard as winter brick.
As I exit on Belmont, I pass a pair

of construction workers, hardhats
tied to belt loops, fallen asleep

shoulder to shoulder, lulled
by the soft hunt of April thunder

that rides across the slates above,
leading lonely names into the west.

Bartender, bartender, tell me a tale
while you sell me a pint of whatever's on sale
-Traditional

Barflies stuck not in amber
but in soft varnish on pine,
steel pole legs scraping the planks:

men bluster in bleary candor
while women lay it on the line.
We at the bar give golden thanks

for this wet and flickering space,
tended by our good mistress
who heals most open wounds...

but not mine. With a tired grace
I slip outside, dissatisfied, listless
under the frozen starless dunes.

Curious things emerge
from this last cup of gin.
Maybe I've been too alone
with the rain and with drink
because strangers converge
into thumb-smudged skins
washing over smoothed stone
into the storm's glottal rink...
I'll stop there and stem
these mannequin thoughts
seeded by a dollar's solitude,
watered by a fallen hem
of night. Thunder's brought
a brand new mood...

I.

Tim collapsed in the bathroom
of the cheap-grease pizza place
where he slogged away idles,

hole in arm. When he came back
from the hospital, I asked why
& he had nothing. A few years

went by and I saw him at a bonfire
& he said, hey, do you remember
that old knife game, mumbletypeg?

Well, it's not the knife flying,
not the blade sinking and shaking,
not the thrill of almost-pain,

it's getting low to the ground
hearing the world get quiet
as you grab the sharpness,

visiting a hungry paradise,
tasting the watery loam in teeth.
"I want to feel the most."

II.

Tim got sober and died
to a wrong way drunk driver.
By then we all knew life

wasn't fair, but this was unnecessary
cruelty by the gods or not-gods
or whoever is cutting threads.

At the next bonfire after that
we remembered him in slices,
how he always wanted to feel

"the most" - how he'd sit
at glazed parties with guitar in lap,
toying with that Metallica solo

to One with his tarnished silver
spider's hands, his eyes covered
in shine as he played softly

an easy laugh readied,
mind full to bursting,
maybe with mumbletypeg.

Tree, tree,
dry and green.

The girl with the beautiful face
is picking olives.
The wind, rake of towers,
holds her by the waist.

Four riders passed
on Anadalusian ponies,
with blue and green suits,
and long dark coats.

"Come to Cordoba, girl."
The little girl doesn't listen.

Three bullfighters passed,
thin-waisted,
with orange suits
and swords of ancient silver.

"Come to Seville, girl."
The little girl doesn't listen.

When the afternoon wore
dark purple, and was fading,
a young man passed, who was wearing
roses and moonlight myrtles.

"Come to Grenada, girl."
And the little girl doesn't listen.

The girl with the beautiful face
keeps picking olives,
with the gray arm of the wind
tight around her waist.

Tree, tree,
dry and green.

**

Arbolé, arbolé,
seco y verdí.

La niña del bello rostro
está cogiendo aceituna.
El viento, galán de torres,
la prende por la cintura.
Pasaron cuatro jinetes
sobre jacas andaluzas,
con trajes de azul y verde,
con largas capas oscuras.
"Vente a Córdoba, muchacha."
La niña no los escucha.
Pasaron tres torerillos
delgaditos de cintura,
con trajes color naranja
y espadas de plata antigua.
"Vente a Sevilla, muchacha."
La niña no los escucha.
Cuando la tarde se puso
morada, con lux difusa,
pasó un joven que llevaba
rosas y mirtos de luna.
"Vente a Granada, muchacha."
Y la niña no lo escucha.
La niña del bello rostro
sigue cogiendo aceituna,
con el brazo gris del viento
ceñido por la cintura.
Arbolé, arbolé.
Seco y verdé.

-by Federico Garcia Lorca
translated by Evan Stephens

I have stopped leaving this room
except for exigencies. Why bother?

Deadened clouds skate on the face
of the black rectangle every night

no matter what moves I make,
& somewhere up and out there

is a numb and strangely ovular moon.
It's all very far from me;

I wash my hands of all of it.
I watch the strange geometries

of strangers sitting tipsily
along the hypotenuse of Columbia Street,

laughing and singing happy birthday to Joan.
Joan is wearing yellow. While they all sing,

she gazes into the lush sinew of the trees.
A thousand years ago...

this street was just a brackish pool.
A thousand years from now,

serpents will bathe on the brick wreck.
But tonight... Joan and her circle

sag and slink into lavender flatness.
Soon they are specks, and then nothing at all.

This poem will say nothing.
"Clouds snowed in the yard,"
and I record it here,
for reasons unknown even to myself.
The clouds have wine-dark pelts,
but that’s nothing new: skies are hard
to find new lines about. Poets fear
the cliché, try to enjamb around it – won’t help.
What is the jaggy cumulus mouthing
in the upper distance? Coagulating lard,
the snow meets salt, goes gray. Look up, peer
into that distance: skullish hills melt,
discolor into the hue of bruise or welt,
as if even the earth self-flagellates, regards
this day with self-loathing. I’ll change gears:
turned skyward like a telescope,
this poem said nothing.

Tuesday night and
you've accepted
the proposal, yet
under the chandelier
of mistaken fireflies
you half-smile,

a drawn curtain
that I can read
enough to worry,
to feel
the body
move away.

The rest of the night
is a sharp nerve,
& gray fingers
of a fog slip
down the street,
thin and ashamed.

Eight years
is long enough
to let yourself have fears.
Eight years
is long enough for tears,
too. It's tough.
Eight years
is long enough.

For years I swam
with pockets full
of stones. The cold
water rushed to
accept me. At
the bottom was
another night
& I lived there
for far too long,
pockets sewn shut,
& my lungs wings
of blackest mud.

I broke free, and
drifted up to
the veins of stars
wavering on
the water's skin.
I took the air
& ate it whole.
Poems dropped from
my brown eyes, I
found you, I was
ready. Dreams lay
below spruces,
with coins of sun
we bought tickets
to history.

But will I hear
those stones again?
Singing from the
false night of the
drowning floor? It
keeps me awake
in the lean hours.

"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts"
-Shakespeare, As You Like It

Panic flocks to an actor's lip:
my perch and cackle cauldron eyes
grow to zeroes at the bed-end of this,
the only stage & staging of my play.

The plot unknotted shows that
money's short and friends are few,
the body betraying itself busily:
an absurd third act.

The audience talks over my lines,
ignoring the tree tops exploding,
the neighbors *******, the heavens
& the hells standing empty.

Yet they hush when the curtain rises
on mosquitos haunting a Brazilian cafe
dotted in cochineal - Aperol spritzes
scatter along a failing, darkling rail.

We can't pick our audience;
neither can we deny that they
can only do their best within their needs,
nothing else or more,

& midnight confessions, truest
& heart-rent soliloquies, are nothing now
but furtive scrawls across a torn ticket,
swept up when the house lights come on.

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

In the deeps
of my night,
your sun opens.
The sight
of your words
sugars me.

When my own sun
achieves the tartness
of noon, you are
opening a book
beneath a
bismuth moon.

For you I still
a heartbeat, send
it on its way.
It will reach you
by morning.

I will write about it,
someday. Today,
though, my life
huddles under
a blue raincoat.
Someday I will
tell it all, really.
See, the problem
is that I have
given away
all my secrets,
but not to you.

Their names
in tatters,
old cardboard,
in the dim
school hall.

Is it a dream?
My old jacket
sleeping by green
cinder blocks,
posed by the
locked boiler
room door?

It is a dream.
The snow has voted
flake by flake
and I must leave,
sweeping my tracks
with an elm branch
as I go.

I do not belong there,
in the past, where the
apricots are always ripe,
where the hopscotch trees
frame the laughter of
their young faces
in amber.

I'll visit them
like a deep sea diver,
in the silence
of pure oxygen,
turning over the sea floor
to find their names
in tatters,
old cardboard.

Red lucent smears
of black bird night
on flat water shine,
everything doubled
by the canal.

Sleep in beer,
old gold light
played over pine
& I'm troubled
by old rationales.

An image appears:
the same sleight
of heart, same shrine
made of rubble,
same blinded chorale.

To E--,

The orange sky
at 9 pm
is thrown over
the streetlamps,
bursting the
starry seams.

It's like you're
here, sometimes,
on this couch
the color of
burnt grass,
looking back
past the gauze
into the
hinging face
of night.

In truth,
you're sleeping
at the crux
of two
continents,
in an
eight-hour wash.

Every night
violent dreams
find me out
& unsew me
a little bit.

But soon
my wing of sleep
will be clean again,
because you will
be returned to me.
The orange sky
at 9 pm will
stop revolting,
and the night
will again be
the sweetest
of burdens.

Always Yours,
E---

She wrote our love in water,
(the rain lived in her)

we drummed into each other
with blue Pontiac fumbles

breath skating our necks
& empty loops of denim left

in book-spilled footwells.
Our smiles cooked the dark

as we recalled the road
to Cincinnati, to see the college

on the hill, her mother
& her friend up front,

us in the back seat napping
(& then not napping whispering

with the wet of our eyes,
her fluent periwinkle

my coffee-steam pools),
hands so careful so careful.

She wrote our love in water
(the waves lived in her)

our names purling, creasing,
stirring, smoothing, gone.

Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.

Salt crush,
brown rubble
of eye.

Honey low,
string sob
on cheek.

Send sweet,
spun tongue
in tow.

Left spent -
night stop,
black brake.

By dawn's five
I'm hers
all again.

Aşkım
ben her zaman seninim.
Bu yarım şiir
sizin dilinizde
asla yeterli olamaz
duygularımı ifade etmek.
Çok bağlıyız,
Anladığını biliyorum.


"My love,
I'm always yours.
This half poem
in your language
could never be enough
to express my feelings.
We are so connected,
I know you understand."