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

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

Glazy rain snakes, are you lost,
wending in tandem on the pane's cheek?

You avoid my finger as I trace
your lacing knits of past and future.

I'm newly home from the pine bar,
curdled litany of flirtations

shed like a salted witch's skin.
I don't know why I do it to myself,

but the curiosity rises in me every time.
O rain, breaking and beading

on the glass lip, on the night loop,
I'm holding out my empty hand

to you, a midnight plea in hush:
teach me your way of cutting cloud

& slipping to streak an autumn eve
until you find that smiling smear

who tastes you just for fun?
The moon is shapeless tonight,

& all their eyes are locked in wax;
I'm impatient to make coffee for two.

You live on the canal,
by the little swan
that whittles the sun.
A sudden rush of clouds,
a clatter of sandals -
caprice of Dublin.

I knew of Dublin
and its grand canal
from old books tan as sandals.
I read Yeats for a swan,
Joyce for castle clouds
that yielded little sun.

But you, you were the sun!
You lit green Dublin
from within. Clouds
fled from the canals
of your eye. "Swansies."
And summer's far sandals

were today's sandals:
time shifted in the sun,
took flight like the night swan
through ancient Dublin.
You sent letters from the canal,
letters that divided clouds,

only to calve new clouds.
I've never worn sandals,
not ever, but when the canal
danced in my dreams, the sun
pierced my foot in Dublin.
You were my swan,

my elegant swansie,
killer of cloud,
conquistador of Dublin
in gladiatorial sandal,
herald and avatar of sun,
romantic of the grand canal.

Let me taste unclouded sun -  
let sandals upend the canal -
send swans by the dozen into Dublin.

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

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

Try to solve
the broken
code of stars.

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

Try to absolve
the gods that
made it this way.

I'm trying to tell you
about the life I spent
on the white elm
pin oak hill,
& about all
the manifold
pains there:
a child's mouth
******* tight
from the inside;
& from the outside,
nailed shut.
A death's place,
a Luxor or Karnak -
where the gods
were stony,
& answered
no prayers,
& where
I segregated
my emotions
into neat,
sealed containers,
for some
later life
to come.

Oh, it wasn't
all terrible:
I learned to
drink young,
& the yellow
night was full
of the river
at high water
mark, and I
looked at the stars
through the
bottoms
of bottles.
I found Jesus
at the side
of the road
& drank
through him too.
The blue light
of morning
came day
after day -
why should
it ever end? -
over the
funereal pin oak
& the sad-winged elm
& the tomb-moss
that settled
over my mouth
& my name.

The sun was
merely a function,
& days just
happened to me
& every bad break
confirmed me
as less than
the barest
crooked twig
broken in the yard.

It took years
to turn that back,
to spit away
the wavering blood
that filled my mouth.
It took longer still
to walk out
into my memory
of the green
light night yard
& recover that twig.
That's what
I'm trying to tell you.

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.

To Meg Eden, after reading her book

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

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

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

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

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

Green bottle,
can you swallow
a whole childhood,
leave only a few drops
on this evening apron?

O sherry-strained Scotch,
blur the lines
of guilt and weight.
After that, what is left
to care about?

Just say it -
you know you should.
Say it quickly, while the night
scrapes an onyx crutch
toward still another oblivion.

Under elm spread
a fistfight nearly
happens, but late-age
trolls are content
to roll trash through
the graves of their teeth.

Maybe it was the heat
that made you sign
my name to this spit;
maybe it was the heat
that pushed you into
this quiet bitterness.

Going home in
caustic steps, the
dead clouds fall
like ripe oranges
onto the street.

I can't stop sweating.
Instead of nursing
with black milk
we prepare a sky
with green stars that
came by mail,
untroubled by the
useless, wicked elms.

"Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up"
-Richard III, Shakespeare


The sky is a bland face of gray linen,
a faded shroud-scrap, a broken nail
of moon lost in the bedsheets.

My friends live in the black skin
of the phone. They are lost gloss.
Golden windows swell and crack

with light in the early May eve.
Lager, sherry, scotch: dogs sniff
the dead things in the street.

I am a tenth of a soul. Unfinished
in this breathing scar, this scorn,
scarce half made. I am a tenth,

or less. I am sunken, buried
in the broad ash water.
My brown eye is custard.

I sink into my chair. What happened?
The night has slipped away.
The moon is lost in the sheets.

Dearest,

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

Did she end it?
As I'm thinking,
a weight
of night
slips into me.

I don't know
where I stand,
exactly, but
at least
I don't leave

wanting to drink
this old grief
in gulps that
leave no room
for air,

like those
other times.
No one answers
my texts.
What did

those words mean?
The driver
talks on
about the night,
but has no idea

that I'm in
his backseat
eating the night
and dying.
Yes I know

I'm difficult,
is that what
happened?
Is that
what happened?

It was hard to be wise....
You must eat change and endure
-Robinson Jeffers

Unzip this skin and see
your words impaled
on these tusks of heart:

curled myrtle wreathes hung
so pretty on a chamber door.
Look deeper - I am stuffed full

of your words, crushed up
like newspapers so they all fit,
the ink staining my fingers.

Unzip me and see them all
scattered like black poppy seeds,
like black ash on the wall

of the oven. You left them
all behind without asking,
left me too full of them.

I tried to tattoo over them,
I tried to ***** them out
with scotch (O how I tried

& tried and tried)
I tried to rake them away,
I held funerals for them

black wax candles, hex-moons,
but they never slept, and soon
they itched their way free.

Come get them -
you must be running out
of new things to say.

Thorning sun
over all of this
sweet yolk
& rain: the impression
of you mixes
with the violent
bouquets of etched air
that rise past
my velvet knee.

Buying wine,
one hand holds
ten dollars
while the other
clasps the glass letter
you floated to me.
I leave the moon
alone. The memories
are fencing sabers
anyway.

Valentine's:
a cup of wine
I raise in toast
to your bobbed hair.

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.

Such perfect lines -
the green smears
of woman on the
right, the blue
river stroke,
long white strings
along the women,
each to each.
Yellow drifts here
& there. Black
in little pools.

It's a horrible
sadness. Are they
scattering ashes?
Was someone
lost at sea? Is the
green woman hiding
tears behind
the seashell fan?
Why is there
such a terrible
sameness of sky
& water and earth?

There is something
awful here. The faces
all turned away
from us. Nature's
straight, the women
bent and twisted,
& the texture -
everything is
coming apart.

Up on the deck
the pink cascade
of evening stumbled
against a blue stop.
Stars seemed fine
as powder.
The moon was golden,
a Brasher doubloon
nailed to the felted smear
of milky way.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
Fights on the street
scattered under the
water head. Brains
hissed with poetry
as rain dwindled.
We heaped stones
on the truth.
We knew it wouldn't
last like that.
          Night knelt
          into the red bowl
          of Autumn;
          Summer died slowly,
          cloaked all in yellow,
          behind your shoulder.
The world without you
keeps breaking down:
the morning motorcycle
won't stop idling, I can't
cut books from their shelf,
food is an accusation.
Stars abrade, the moon
is sold for scrap.
Where are you?

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.

"Love is the worst religion,"
croons the dying television,

with no further explanation;
well, thanks for the news -

I see myself in emptied glass,
a bust carved rude and inchoate,

poet, captain, lost apostle
of the worst religion,

baptized in changeling pools
of day and week, scribbling

my night's peak breath
on the flypapers of insomnia.

Sun over sainted skin,
stars where evening eyes were,

swain's vespers, all of it
splitting like new ripe fruit

in sticky hands of the acolyte,
ardent hands of little silver.

Love's lost today
in teeth's glaciers;
& pallbearer feet,
tho pigeon-toed,
march me away
from erasure.
A heart escheats
to whom it's owed,
one must repay;
for love's nature
is grieving fleet,
& must erode -
an ache rehearsed
forever in verse.

I can feel the vacancy
you leave when you are far,
and a melancholy's taken me.

This autumn core has wakened me,
but the sun's removed from sky,
I feel the vacancy.

Other couples drift complacently,
in and out of bars,
and a melancholy's taken me.

The joy of the new art's forsaken me.
I hardly know what we are,
but I feel the vacancy.

I cross K street mistakenly,
distracted by a reminiscent car,
and a melancholy's taken me.

We flower in this latency,
this "attend et regarde."
I feel the vacancy,
and a melancholy's taken me.

On the fifth of July,
after thin string nights,
you'll fill my eye.

We'll coax the moon nigh,
bask in grey light
on the fifth of July.

Verse I'll supply,
& as I write
you'll fill my eye.

Rejoice in reply
to a gentle bite
on the fifth of July.

Once bashful and shy,
I'll soon ignite,
you'll fill my eye.

Into the city you'll fly
with your delights -
on the fifth of July,
you'll fill my eye.

My heart's exploding
like a thundercloud -
No, my heart's eroding,

my tongue corroding,
iron-bound, rain-ploughed,
no heart's exploding.
  
But the moon's unloading
a tide that's pain-proud,
& I feel my heart's eroding.

I hear it all, try decoding
her art. Play it loud -
until my heart's exploding.

Yet something's foreboding,
these sheets are shrouds -
under them, my heart's eroding.

Her eyes are goading
until I've vowed
to her my heart's exploding -
But my heart's eroding.

It fell below
freezing today.
They say it might snow.

My morning is slow,
I saw sun's only ray
as it fell below

the black blow
of cloud's spray;
it might snow,

a flaking flow
gray on gray,
bringing me low,

as though
it knows you're away.
They say it might snow

like crumbles of dough
dropping my way;
sinking, falling below; 
it might snow.

The blood is true
in what it needs,
& what it needs is you.

My blood was blue,
but red it bleeds
if blood is true.

"Please come through,"
my heart's pleads -
what it needs is you.

"Xoxo," your preview.
I don't mislead,
the blood is true.  

My heart's subdued
without you, I concede -
what it needs is you.

We both know what to do,
& soon we will be freed -
The blood is true,
& what it needs is you.

"Wine is the mirror of the mind."

The cut glass
fluorescence
of sloe gin and *****,
cuffed to my wrist,
scours the tabletop
with self-cruel smiles.

In the convex glass
I'm wearing
a robe of pills.
In the convex glass
my hand's curve
strangles a joy
back down to size
with forced sleep.

Dizzy on the bird's
chop-wing of couch,
half-tapped glasses
lose the day to the
little white discs
laboring to lift me
roughly into the spaces
between the stars.

The octagonal glass
is so empty.

Clouded ****,
nail's slow sink,
stone blood rink,
corrected lines.
Brunette sway,
ensorcelled flock
of locks, half-blocks
great hazel bay.
Humid bone,
inky throne,
column's silk,
buttermilk,
scarlet lip,
laugh's skip.

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.

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.

Blind, inconstant love:
you rose up and shattered
on me like the burst salt wave
over the night promontory.
I was so unprepared...

And then you receded,
back into the sea, impossible
to differentiate from the rest,
the only traces of you
what remained on me.

She was throwing wax
at the sun all Saturday,
ruining all her mother's
best tapers.

But try and tell her
that piercing the
hard blue afternoon
as it moves inevitably
to an obscene yellow
isn't some kind
of worthwhile task,

try and tell her
that the wax arrows
that chagrine
back to the yard
aren't some kind of protest
against a foot's limit
when else she would fly,
try and tell her.

"We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:—"
-Shelley


Dad would have been eighty today;
instead, years have gone by since I ran
the two and a half miles to the hospital
under a burnt, charry October wing

to visit him in his mechanical bed.
He was caving into himself, the doctors
blamed the liver, everyone was scared.
The halls were stocked with floating eyes.

Today the heat gripped the chopped hems
of street and ate away at our feet.
The dish of sky grew gray as mold,
striped with varices of rain that did not break.

Everything waits: Wednesday waits
for Thursday's lip, the moon waits
for the thunderbolt tongue, I am waiting -
for almost anything, anything to happen to me.

Belted star! Swing from the sea,
the gin is free, and we will drink out here
against the rail, needed company:
To my chagrin I’ve called her once again,
sleepless in Chicago’s restless drives.
She lets me know it’s not the night
to reconnect the nervous histories dreamed
between us in a single anxious twitch -
imperfect people love imperfectly.
Belted star, half-drunk on gin,
let's begin to count the countless
wraithly sheetings of the wind,
before I'm called inside by spills
of sotted laughter, and you're dimmed.

In the Wednesday sun
crossing Farragut Square
beside a beautiful woman
of half-developed feelings,
there is a temptation
to forget thirty-eight years
of women just like her.

All my romances
are desperate tries
to close the old voids
that my family seeded in me.
Love me,
accept me,
stay,
please stay,
just stay,
I will take anything,
be any shape,
anything you like.

I loved women
one to the next
a wreath of sincerity.
I was always astonished
when it fell apart.

In the Wednesday sun
I am depressed.
I say goodbye
to my blonde friend,
and I curl up inside
like paper burning.

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.

We didn't quite think it through,
did we now?

We just pushed that harrow
even when the fields were underwater.

Now the wires bring us
the yes-no grammar of old love.

Lewd sun, cloud-tumble,
violets dying in the loam:

images lashed to the lens,
the loom, the wine-weave

of the eye... well,
we held on for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our chemistry
is so wrecked.
I adore you -
you don't adore me,
but maybe you do,
you are so depressed,
we're just waiting that out
& seeing how things feel after.
In the meantime, you treat me
alternatingly like a casual
acquaintance and a former lover,
while I am unwavering in my
devotion to your cause.
I cried for an hour at my desk
because I am so unhappy.
Please let this end,
please come back
to who you were.

"To find a kiss of yours,"
Lorca wrote,
"What would I give?"

The sediment of the sun
isn't enough, stumbling
into cobbled alleys,
getting lost in bookstores.

& the wing of moon
just multiplies into the earth
with gutters of shadow,
forging letters to old lovers.

The tides of the air are fading
on this churlish Sunday,
yet still I haven't found
what I would give for your kiss -

A little hand of silver?
Every third breath?
My best and hidden whisky?
My heart's speakeasy password?
My giant white and silver painting?
A green wing of evening?
This poem?

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

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

Years ago, we went down
to the wheat field, it was freezing,
& we idly plucked some burst chaff
before fumbling against a split rail,
the neighbors all watching
from kitchen windows,
let them watch, you said,
as you kissed me,
knees shaking in the yellow lake.

When I was ten I stepped on a honey bee
resting in the gravel, it stung me and died

& in that moment I tried to bargain with death,
I said I will **** no more bees and in return

I too will not die. Death said nothing, of course,
he, or she, or it, was quiet as an elm or a shingle,

as the millionfold language of the grass.
I imagined assent but now, looking back,

I realize that nothing was finalized,
we never shook on the deal. No, the bee died

on my bare foot, defending itself against
a strange olive hide that blotted the sun.

Three and a half decades later I perch here
in my tower, my brain congested

with depressions, my heart a fallen fog,
my hands ache strangely and my legs tire -

perhaps the best I can manage is to further
the stoic philosophy of the slaughtered bee:

sometimes the best you can do is to slow
a shadow that's more real than the object.

When will we talk
about the leaving?

Walking beneath
the red castle tower?

Across a sandy lawn,
where a glass wisp
moon perches bitten
in the blue quadrant?

Drinking Autumn
down as the new early
night rolls into the air?

No, the next morning,
in the empire of our bed.

The window aches
with excess sun, and
my mouth flakes away.

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.

Where is your body
when you text me?

In the searching dark
of the bedroom, where

the drunks and gulls
bear cries against the window?

On the riverwalk
when the clouded gray

syrup leaks through
onto the water face?

By the fresh red trees?
The third floor coffee?

The archery garden,
near the strawberry tree?

I will tell you, darling,
that my hands are busy

filling these lines
3379 miles and 5 hours west

of your river city -
but I wish they were busy,

following the lines of your nape,
your shoulder, your smile.

Night, night...
hammer handle.
Unzip this skin
& spill the salt.
Moon veers to ink
as it dreams
through the screen,
& darkness rides
the blotter.
Clouds cough,
sick over the spot
where you slept.

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.

"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." -John 1:5

I find whisky grammar in the cold sluices,
in the curve of the thickened glass-ash.

The bourbon cask gave its woody soul
to the barley spirit, to the amber shadow.

The New Year comes but I reject it;
the sun-ball drifts yellowing like an old page,

the moon rises like a bleached skull.
Ireland came and went, full of green iron secrets.

My life was full, but now it is empty.
I live in a high room full of guitars,

full of alcohol, full of deathly ulcers,
full of Plath and her sweet ether.

The air is seared. The water boils.
The witch shakes her hazel wand,

& demons sigh in resignation - why bother?
Humans move the darkness in little pieces.

Somewhere in Sicily, in Silesia, in Kent,
my blood is moving without me. My blood -

it's loving another. It's never had a headache.
It actually lives a full life, somewhere else,

that good red life. But not here: Here,
I drink in the old cemetery, with the blurry pebbles.

This breeze would scarcely stir a wasp-wing;
how will it ever bear away the coming rain
massing in loose cuffs over the flat-faced slate?
It won't. The rain will squat here in the gray
like Baba Yaga's hut. My eye drowns
in the soft drift of the water petals.
There is a single white cloud, doubled
in the black water of the road. It doesn't move,
as if paralyzed. There is no joy in this place,
only this numb wisp that hangs
like a poorly glued ornament:
a quick wheeze, a gasp, a cigarette breath,
a wracked cough, a corpse-smear.