Primo Sonno, the traditional First Sleep that was common before the Industrial Revolution, it occurred between nightfall and midnight after which the sleeper arose to interpret dreams, pray, write...

The cherry liquor puts me down
around the time the snowfall arrives,
when the blackish hem of night
is snugged over the last lacy orange light.

I have jamais vu - I see the familiar,
& feel nothing, an iron-browed stranger
gazing out at the dim flake-fall,
the urban hush that sweeps away the scrawl.

At midnight I wake to an insistent horn
deep in the street pockets. I dreamt
of people with guns following me,
gluey-eyed, marching quay to quay.

In the dark, I almost remember her.
In the dark, my stomach is filled with acid.
Shadows hiss in the bleary mirror,
a cold breeze scrapes a little nearer.

I was speaking
the words
that divorced her
sometime long ago.
The words
were less
than air,
& multiplied
like bacteria.

Some version
of them happened
again in a
cell phone
& again,
years later,
in another mouth,
while I watched
& again, again
came the words.

I gave them
my absence
too many times.
Now I sit alone
with a Scotch
on the rocks
inviting
the repetitive eagle.

Across thousands of miles
you lay your claim on me
with your purple stockings.

My body is your riot, full
of blood's disobedience
& a climbing incandescence.

I am your lamp. Coyly
you insinuate provocative
thoughts. I'm helpless,

I'm guttering like a candle
on a caravel, burning
despite the danger.

Thousands of miles, but
there is only me and you
and a thin, thin stretch of purple.

Your hair shakes
with a debt of stars.

City night can't
pass blue, and the

coin cloak moon
escapes its room

with a key made
from a rose thorn.

You lay into the bed
clad in pink silk,

black lace, your
skin fair as a page.

There is a breeze
that sounds like rain.

I dare to read your
emissary shoulder

& become dizzy,
my breath broken

among my teeth.
You could be made

of engraved silver
and I would not

be more speechless
or more delicate.

Shake the stars
from your hair,

so that a midnight
might curl there.

Light the little candles
bright as thighs

and join me here
by the window

sipping your whiskey
and watching clouds

chase a truant moon
towards the gigantic

green lacuna of
Grant circle.

You fill the world
with secret meaning -

for example,
these small wisps,

these puffballs
that meadow to

dandelions,
Once they carried

my wishes.
They would scatter

on their strange
sails and raise

the yellow brightest.
But then,

you and I
we watched Amarcord

where puffball
swing seasons

into town,
salt a wedding,

mark the limits
of memory,

of childhood.
Now I see them,

gracing across
the fields

& yards
& I think

automatically
of you.

The mind is a constant quarry,
the scrabbled ore of thought
gathered to furnace maw,
deveined, burned out.
Birds wheel, hook, and flurry -
drop the ash seeds that brought
rubble to flourish. Dead rock and raw,
bad teeth in pit’s open mouth,
unwanted dross tells its story –
for every bar of artful iron wrought,
an equal amount is grossly flawed,
discarded, the earth’s wracking gout –
for each cathedral built, for every Gilgamesh,
there’s **** enough to grow a leafing ash.

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.

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.

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.

"It's quite a pretty hell,
quite a pretty hell,"

said the wilting woman
to her plastic window self,

a half-tint fetch, etched
in the eye of the weevil

threading the black dough
of the crosstown bus route.

The nightclubbers behind her
exchange glances and hold hands

as she begins to hum to herself,
but the unvarnished melody

lodges in an angle of odd brain
& soon I'm humming it too

as I step into 18th Street's maw,
already bristling neon sweet

with milkmaid dress hems
threshing ruptured doorsteps -

turning up my street I catch
a last sight of the shushed bus husk

crawling away northwards
with only a scratching hum inside

for its heartbeat, and a face lost
in the catacomb of its reflection.

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 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.

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.

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.

As Jack wipes blade against
Black butcher's bib,
Calm as clouds, London lies,
Dark sloe.
Extracted so easily, her heart’s
Firm in its new wax paper square,
Growing cooler by gradients,
Hardly weighing a pound, nestled
Inside his pocket as carefully as a wallet.
Jostled in courtyard, just
Knowing what they brush gives him
Little fevers that don’t stop burning.
Mary, Black Mary,
Nothing could have stopped him
Once he turned his mind to you, your
Painted paper skin, black pulp mouth
Quiet, and ***** hair rustling,
Rusting ginger to burned blond.
Saucy Jack sends his cards,
Then goes out and larks
Under a moon greasy as a kidney;
Violence foams from his lips
Where no one saw it before or
eXpected it. Imagine calming
Yourself as he does: surgical
Zeal transformed into the most banal hello.

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.

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.

The clouds keep dying -
I eye them from this rooftop,
sitting in blue wicker,
living exactly one year
in the past, back before
you took that selfie
in the plane's oculus,
the one I printed out
& put up on the fridge,
on your way to Istanbul.
Covid spit out 9 months
of long distance and maybe
something died between us,
like these clouds die -
softly, slowly, failing
in the early evening.
You entertained someone else.
When I visited Dublin,
you could barely kiss me.
It took ten days
until that toll was paid.
Now you're still in Dublin,
the green city I love so much,
visiting those parks you lent me,
running to the sea
where I bought you a high tide.
I still live in Washington,
so ******* alone,
sitting on this red rooftop
watching clouds pass away,
not knowing when
I'll see you again.
I've given absolutely
everything to you,
so please grant me this favor:
turn your handsome hazel
to this blue chair
where I down scotch
after scotch, and find a way
to save me, because the night
is coming so quickly,
so quickly.

We held hands
as we approached it,
the pink, black,
orange monument.
We stood as if we expected
something from it,
but it failed us,
an indifferent oracle.
Your hand slipped from mine
as you stepped closer,
for a second you were
inside it, eaten whole
by its hide glue mouth,
before you drifted
in diagonals
to other colors.

I dreamed about
runaway horses
dragging the shadows
of early winter through the field.

I dreamed about first snow
falling today in the wood,
collecting in little pockets,
gathering in the grass.

I dreamed you held my hand
through all of it, breath
hanging in the chill.
The two of us, watching

wild hooves stamp and
kick through new snow -
I dreamed of love,
I dreamed of distance.

Open eyes and rise,
lope to the bath,
salt meridians on cheeks,
third day this December,
though no dreaming cries
whose bleach-paths
waken one weak
are remembered;
the night-face dries
and the aftermath
is grief's white speech,
a scrawl in slumber,
unmapped marks
a brush's lead-white arcs.

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.

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 glass stands here
in the lee of the rattle;
the sun's yellow syrup erupts
into this bottle-breeze;
I will signal to you
in the ways you understand;
I will be your silver armor,
your lance and pennant.

You are Dublin, Istanbul,
you are Amsterdam, Paris, Rome,
you are New York, Washington,
you are Dublin again.

I'm trapped in Washington -
please save me.
Snuffs of ice winnow
towards me in the mornings.  

Return me to the strokes
of your bed, under the window
glutted with gulls, where the triptych
stakes soft pitches of rain.

Come and retrieve me
from these lidless clouds,
unending widow's eye,
che gelida manina.

Thaw, love,
& hold me there -
I am yours,
or don't you remember?

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.

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.

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.

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.

There will be a totem -
maybe castles are green
in gavottes of sun,
or a sly, sleek-angled bus
by a sky-headed smoker
will make its play.

Yes, we're in a play
about these totems,
where exiled smokers
in a delirious green
catch the last bus
to the sun.

But that diva sun
refuses to play,
& eats the bus.
Ain't that a totem?
We'll always be green,
always casual smokers,

(or is it social smokers?)
flicking ash at that sun,
which is evening green.
In the museum we'll play
among the totems,
catch a line of buses,

& then another bus,
almond exhaust smoke,
until we view the totem -
a saddle on the sun,
a silence in our play,
a voluptuous green.

The same green's
splashed on the bus.
Maybe the best play
for a casual smoker
is to eat the sun,
eat the totem,

then eat the green.
Take the express bus
to another play.

You're off the plane
back in Istanbul,
where your heart
was made. Now, at night,
it seems a little peculiar
this time.

But you've got all the time
in the world. The plane
is long gone for some peculiar
destination, while Istanbul
belongs only to you tonight,
you can explore its heart...

Yes, tell me all about that heart
and about all the times
you walked out into the night
and looked up at the trails of planes
flying far above the lights of Istanbul -
They must have said it was peculiar,

to want to leave on one. Or not peculiar,
maybe it felt natural, easy in the heart,
a readiness to leave old Istanbul
and embrace someplace else this time,
to climb aboard the waiting plane
and fly off into the night.

When you land, it's still night -
isn't that peculiar?
The plane disappears
and it's just you and your heart
this time.
Say goodbye to Istanbul -

So many places aren't Istanbul,
all of them under the night
of drowsy stars and slow time.
It's rather peculiar
how the heart
is faster than any plane.

But this time, love, you're in Istanbul.
I watched your plane cruise the night.
It's peculiar how my heart hurts.

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.

She reads by candle
in the little kitchen
by the rain-licked window,
pushing against a dark
that's black as pepper,
black as the merlot bottle.

It's empty, the bottle,
neck used for candles.
As for the pepper,
it spread across the kitchen
in the quasi-dark,
when she opened the window.

No - that window
is a lie. So is the bottle,
& the rest. I tried the dark
against the candle,
in the mind's kitchen,
got stuck on pepper.

Let's try again: pepper
falls like snow in the dark
when I'm in the kitchen
making dinner, bottles
open for tasting, candles
lit against the coming dark...

Much better. Seal this dark,
speckled with salt and pepper,
with the soft wax of candles.
Open the window,
tilt the bottle,
dance in the kitchen,

the new kitchen -
feel the call of the dark -
drink from the same bottle,
Burgundy earthy as pepper,
close the windows
& touch me with the candle.

I drink from the bottle in the black kitchen,
ignoring the cold candle in the dark.
There's pepper blowing out the window.

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 speak
& dice
roll on
my tongue.

I move
to kiss
you
& my
mouth
is filled
with
sevens,
sevens,
sevens.

My heart casts
a shadow
that takes
your form:
How can I
resist?

No phone call tonight.
The sick moon
coughs a cloud -
like a gray stain
on its face -
& I watch
as the new cloud
falls through the night
like a guillotine.

Sick moon,
thin and waxing,
my chest is
a curving hurt too.
Twisted and torqued
by the old carving forks
from the Thanksgivings
where red wine
sat screaming, and
polished plates
were also moons,
hard and silent
and empty.

No phone call now,
the breakup is done.
I shed my skin and salt it.

No phone call now,
only vagrant silence.
The sick moon breathes
a scrape of cloud
down the quiet
spine of night.

The worries
come on the walk
back, melting
together like ice
in the glass:
I'm missing
something,
& what pieces
remain
are broken,
& that I am
never in control
of it.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

No, you don't
see a thing,
I'm sealed,
a sarcophagus,
a remote satellite,
the flood
is put away
as neatly as
a magazine
on the newstand.

I make another
oath, to pry
open the tomb,
to speak with
a mouth
like a glen,
to accept
that I am not
my parents
nor the drift
of their silence.

The sidewalk is one shadow
on top
of another,
on top
of another,
all the way back.

I'm inside the silver
train, whose hard
yaw sway recalls
wristwatch midnights
when you'd pry me
open text by text.

The train chatters
black chisels but
your letters still flow
across the underworld,
where you agitate
with Quixotic chemistry.

The doors slip
against the platform.
As I split the gate,
you remind me that
without a polishing hand
silver sleeps in tarnish.

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.

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.

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.

“There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” -Edgar Allan Poe

We're all sick animals, tied together
on this clouded ball. Wet snow erupts
on a Sunday night, a gray flake navy,
mobiles above a black crib -

snow loosens into shaking sleet.
There is no one here - not even me.
The night is pink and orange,
under an anesthetic dome.

Don't we deserve more, better?
The streets are filled with taillights,
red rivers of light, salted, frothing,
as the freezing drips spray the pane.

Maybe we don't. Look out there,
at the wet world. We're just seeds
that open a root to the flood, swept
away into the teeth of the past.

I.

Your fingers raking
through chestnut wreaths
gapped with gloss:
the wind mussed your hair

into a sudden wild shape,
& the canal was glowing
like a runaway filament
in the buttery dusk.

You had gone quiet inside,
months before.
You slipped a spider's lyric
under my tongue.

Summer was really winter,
& winter was a belt cinched
around a hopeful throat
crawling with clouds.

II.

I'm not good on my own.
I drink too much,
I have terrible dreams,
I don't move for hours, days.

Stars bleach me, pierce deep
into a plastic rib space.
Old friends get married,
get pregnant, go invisible.

I turn on the charm,
a smile pooling amid
the pink. Whisky
floating over two tongues...

Was I supposed to make a move?
I missed a cue, somewhere.
I feel my insides lurching
like sun-broken snow.

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.

The fog loses purchase
on the window
and, dying, wicks
ashy vapor's slick scatter
to gated green-brown.
Morning comes again
in fractioned crooks
of snow declining
into fat eggs of rain.
The fog is a colossus,
ravels with dragging step,
before retiring itself
above oak branchlets.  
The sun wraps away
in gray, as if stolen.  
Nativity of cloud.
I'm telling you this:
everything is possible.

It's snowing
tonight,
and I think
******* Dad,
when Maryland
beats Indiana
and I move
to text him.

He's beyond
snow now.
So what do I do
with these
unbearable photos
he took of me
standing alone
in the withered sun
on monumental trains,
I was six or seven,
out by the
rusting roundhouse
in Brunswick?

It's been snowing
for hours
& I carve
a footpath
out to the
unplowed street
to watch the
shining gray
banks under
the amber light.

There is no
route to carve
through this silence.
My father
was built
from ghost towns,
from Manzanar,
from the endless
pine-dark
of Idaho's
rivered night,
from all the
unmapped places,
he grew complete
in himself.

And even now
as I watch
the snow slant
and stumble
I am left behind
as his son
apart from him
& without.

The snow dives
into the
night blankness
& I wonder
if I had died
first, cutting
short this reckless
careless crooked
sprawl, would he
be writing here?

The smeared
gray glow
of the screen
across his hands,
the fat flake
snow rising
like dough
beneath the windows?

The purple folding face drips
into the cake-colored battlement:
night is here again.
The sun has kneeled into the treeline,
into the gauze-clouds
whose humid cobalt heads
hang, hang, just hang
all angled like hammers
in a carpenter's belt.  

Everything seems to be ending:
cicadas have erupted
in tens and sevens
with bright scarlet eyes
to die on the sidewalks
in little hums and hisses,
looking at me through
whetted blades of lawn.

I'm moving soon, to the point
of the old triangle
where we haunted
the coffee and ice cream store,
where she stole a little shining spoon
that we used to mix the luminous milk
into the coffee pool.

How will it feel, after dark,
under unfamiliar high-stippled ceilings?
So quiet - she's gone -
her vacant clothes
no longer flutter in the closet
when the breeze slips through.

Will some rain come,
blue-brushed brow,
& wash this feeling away?
I feel the night moving,
crawling on insect feet -
the air is full of absences,
great holes that go unfilled.

The wind is settled in the east,
and the clouds are gathering
heavy hems.
I find a single dark hair of hers
on the inside of the pillow case,
years later,
years later.

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.

Wide dollars of summer thunder
brush the early night.
I've messaged you: no reply yet.

The cloud-curtain births
small violent flags of rain
that waver and fall limp
into the hot gray of the street.  

I'll have no part of it -
instead I'll work on my map
of your thoughts that I started
years ago, even before you knew.