The catastrophe.

How did we meet, you and me?

Did a tornado force us beneath the surface where

We had no other choice?

Or was it in clean air when you said your clean name

And my dirty hand caught it.

Blue wilderness bends—it withers

But I’ve never been understood.

Lucifer.

Light, light.

Naked light imposed on the brown 

Fortress of Humankind,  and  expected 

To grow, 

Raise its own children. 

Raise its own head out of God’s loss

I wouldn’t do that.

I wouldn’t believe in that.

Always the ant beholden to a timely hill.

Only so much its attendant.

Valentine

 The love story I’m going to tell you is short—

Surprisingly short, given the sprawl of time:

Each gauge corresponds with something on the ship we need.

And when we hit impracticalities we say

We’re all in the same boat. 

I don’t want to dicker over class. I know who I am.

Everywhere I ever lived I hid five dollars in a paper

Football by the largest tree nearest the front door. Look

For a measure of pink yarn. You’ll find me.

You’ll never find me.

The Origin of Brix

Everything about a haunted house 

Feels certain when you’re afraid 

In the dark you see something move;

It divides you. You adjust your

Focus helplessly.

Guts ecstasy

It’s kicking in.

2

 Hemingway said bankruptcy takes place

In two stages: the first slow, the second fast.

When someone loves you and you touch their hair,

You feel yourself falling.

Nobody’s fingers in her hair need a god.

1

 Verse one is mostly click-clack

Click. The second verse is click-clack

Click as well. Older, but no wiser.

Verse three opens on a scarecrow brilliantly 

Colored by the sun. Click-clack

Click. Please keep my hand by your heart.

People keep coming around.

You’ll find as many gasps for air in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

As there are in all of Somerset County. A place on Earth

Relaxes into the dominion imposed upon it. We

Go out and see a jubilation of discredited greenery

Waiting to dazzle us.

As if all their lives depended on the success in 

Our I wouldn’t quite say smiles. 

People keep coming around.

Alain Delon

 When Alain Delon died I thought everything was garbage.But mostly because everything was already garbage when he died.

Duke Ellington died about sixteen months before I was born. Nabokov in Switzerland when I was two. 

I like thinking about death this way, as a kind of ledger in which the shifting balance isn’t held to a generic standard:

Look at his eyes. His piscine, the only piscine of my dreams.

Laughter in the dark, 

 When I was a kid a carp swam between my legs.

The water went along; everybody dreams about the past.

The white floss of our dalliance with the sea fits us

With a scar. Take a long look.

Your heart sings.

 The explosive fire thar destroys you in the end

Owes itself to a single chemical.

Think of the red head of a match.

The sulphuric you smell is youth being languidly

Burned away.

The not smell of anything is a part of your heart

Sings.

Untitled #2

 The world of wonders has yet to be born.

I see young people at the pool taunting one another,

Screaming. The dry white grass prickles.

Their eyes bloom with heavenly rain.

Untitled #1

 I keep dreaming of myself in the eyes of

The lord.

I am young, swimming, I’m crying,

A loud child child begging the universe

For a sense of purpose. What do I get?

A galaxy of perverse silence. And maybe something else.

Quentin Compson’s Pocket Watch.

 One thing minus the horse has to happen first.

Here you are. What are you thinking? Are you

Leaving so soon? Green joy. We love you. Have

Some stew before you move on. Rest.

The sons and daughters of the town wonder, too,

How you got here, your eyes on the ocean , your

Drawings of places they’ve never been and how you

Drew them.

Your feet on their fathers’ cliff.

They won’t talk about it, but what about you.

Looking down, now, did you ride here on a horse?

Less than knowing.

Okay, the weird glow of the thing is that

Love is permanent,

And it will last forever. But we don’t. It’s up to us to bring Colored yarn and tie our letters to the

Rail before it goes out to sea.

In Torquay, in 1997, in a fog and drunk on cider

I saw France. I mean, I know I saw it—

Which somehow makes it less than having been real.

A pillar of salt.

Language must look back and

Miss the discipline of the type-

Writer.

There was a row you could watch

As it fell in on itself. A putty blue

Roller

Controlled everything—even the sea-

Foam of heaving errors, and a gull mis-

Taking 

            A period for its spot. 

Lepidoptera.

We’ve come so far—you and me.

The staircase, the creaking footbridge,

The murder mystery in Yorkshire.

You looked at me as if questioning my doubt,

As a  reader.

I read Nabokov when I was still in school.

Look at all the sparkling things in the light between

Us.

Noon hour.

My heart looks for love—

In salt, in lemons, in the way

People speak Hebrew against all odds.

I wonder if anyone will ever read this, ever catch up with me? 

I am learning something Arabic, I am making dough. The charred fingers of my host extend.

This way.

The English Garden.

There’s a hole inside of me.

I think everybody sees it, and they’re all waiting

For me to say something about it. Maybe, they

Think, that’ll be the start of something good for us.

A couple in the crowd, near the front, look at me as the

Footlight emphasizes my nervous sweat.

I look at the hole. (I will die with this weight on my lap.)

I look at the hole. (I gave away the brilliance of being alive.)

Sand around the edge and some trash

Begin to fall. Everything is reaching a natural

Conclusion.

Finally, my lamb of blood and wasted breath,

The splinter pricks the skin.

How long have these eyelids prevented me from understanding the abusive temperament of 

Spring rain?

Judith, triumphant.

There was a time when i would say something

Preposterous and you would kinda believe me.

We’ve gone beyond that now. Now,

Look into my eyes. Swirling. The weather is mixed,

Your plans are on hold for a while. I ought 

To be wearing a sailor’s cap, which makes me

Want to apologize for hijacking things. Dumb bell,

You were here. I was there. 

Water.

Nobody explicitly

Said not to, so I just sorta became the sea, chopping up

The tender parts of the Earth just to get to the good parts.

It will look at you, the Sun

It will look at you, the Sun—

And that head with its wild strawberry eyes will tilt

As if imagining you’re a sinking ship,

The horizon tethered to its cruel orbit, 

Which is why your ferocity is so 

Important to our survival. 

The course of things as they come to a close.

 I was born in a swamp of glitter. No

One knew quite what to do. Gale

I loved urgently, and I stabbed a guy

Near the corner of his eye, blinding him.

He had kids or a dog. Something.

When I think of it like weather I think

Gale—makes it sound linear and trackable.

Go ahead, wash it all off me, 

Producers.

The list

I’m getting ahead of this 

And telling you now

The list will have my name on it. Everybody’s

Sweating it. The things they’ve done swing before their eyes,

As if acting out the opposite of hypnosis.

In the grass and all the wrong, mowing, stars.

The rabbit, quietly, because it didn’t want anyone to know.

No anesthetic, please. I should just

Face it head on,

Undiagnosed.

The grass and all the wrong. You know, the world can be divided into two sorts:

The ruined beneficiaries of science and the rabbits. 

The slice

 (For Wayne Thiebaud)

A curse will eventually jinx

The poor, 

The dead 

Will get unburied, while the sun

Unsets and there’s an opposite 

Of a sparrow, too.

Of looking. Of classification.

When we think about Victorian science 

It’s with bravado. 

Nobody wants to associate with a passing version of

What happened.

Holga.

 Isn’t it funny how memory is presented in memory?

It is given from the past.

Ever forward, ever on: a body falls deep within itself:

Will I be pretty, will I be rich?

Shall I be the shell on top of 

Beauty, this time when it comes up?

Meanwhile, electricity is famous.

Domesticity

 If you’re gonna have a cat, then

Go on and have a cat.

Let your body fall backwards throughout itself,

Clean, out the window:

Dreamily to the ground and your

Certain death. No

Recourse. But

By

All

Means

Fall,

And have a cat near your heart for all life is sacred.

Winter sleep.

A lifetime of behavioral analysis suggests that when

A cat scrubs his ear with his paw 

The ear is the problem.

Anytime I get up from a bedridden sickness I 

Look at everything as a conglomeration of

Ideas

In which I’m never what’s wrong.

If the song wasn’t such a spell

If  the song wasn’t such a spell,

If the garden wasn’t too brief to be

Tended to by fleeting hands 

If the stars were alive

If I didn’t fuck things up so miserably

The half-shell would yet rise with

My idea of conciliatory beauty

In its humble arm, just

Like a baby about to cry itself alive.

The rib.

What dream of life do we fulfill when we carry this bride

Of possibility across the threshold? 

Will we finally be safe? Will the snake finally 

Speaky English?

“If it wasn’t a scalpel…”

Teach them, if you

Must, though it can’t be taught.

Learn with them, but fair warning,

You will learn alone.

You will walk yourself into circles, thinking, 

Blue.

Against the might of a volcano.

Explain this to me,

Two things that seem so innocuously

Similar in my mind, but set

Loose in the world of ideas,

They evolve in discord.

I tried to write a poem about the sun—

It was going to be apocalyptic, with children staring into 

The vocal point of the volcanic Earth.

A robin blushing in opposition 

But I began to think of a painting

John Singer Sargent did of leisure class

Children holding paper lamps after dark.

A robin, somewhere, against the might of a volcano

And suddenly I was cutting my heart in pieces

Against the grain.  You see

I was trying to divide it equally.

Love dream

The crest is bound to be covered with 

Liars. No cameras on them.

Everybody is looking down from

Their orange spots

At the terrifying volcano, wondering,  

How do we fix love without bothering

The heat we believe in?

A love poem

I think of you anytime

I come across old score keepings

From card games, folded newspapers saved

For the crossword puzzle

In different states of completion. It’s

Hard

To remember in this state of grace that 

We could ever gain so freely from nothing

And give so benevolently to it, as well.

Look at the numbers, blue and random now. Look at the 

Clues as they bury the dead elsewhere.

Come on slowly

But ready to go at it. But, also, take

A little time look around. Gem. It’s all yours.

What you want is where it already is. 

What you don’t is on the curb where boots speak

Fluent Goethe.

You ever ask a boot about how your parents met?

Terroir.

The problem with our

Connectivity is that we’re never lost anymore.

Or it’s a different kind of lost. One without

Depth.

The compass is hypersensitive, outfitted with

Expertise on how to

Survive. The leaves that are shaped like almonds

Are poisonous—the earth is edible and specific to

Its place. You could open a sandwich shop with it.

Wildlife has been managed. Lest we wander there

Are adults with flashlights out there,

Grooming the Cezanne-like confusion

To greater effect. The snacks.

The movie begins at seven—silence.

The hummingbird.

Inside the smallest things 

Beat the hearts of gods. Predators

Come with their vast

Ambitions and

They look as the clock of love tells

Time in microscopic, if unromantic, syllables.

No resentment in their ticking towers, but

Neither is there anything like sympathy.

They’re just looking for sugar. 

Trustworthy doesn’t exist on the map.

Easy, simple, neither.

It is mostly a plain space divided by time on the map.

If you were to prune away enough of the healthy moment

And dig online 

There, you would find the body in a bed of sorry

And no knock warrants.

There you go.

The old tired song.

 I keep telling myself, asshole,

You have this much time, and this much

Money to get it all done.

Imagine, okay, the Devil.

He is clean and red  and you can smell ginger.

His G-d is your G-d so no surprises there—

But the way he looks at you says everything

About how he uses his belt. And he 

Never seems to remember you.

They’d rather lick the clock clean than help me.

Drunk mythology.

Two statuettes complement one another

In my living room.

One is a Goddess of the art deco.

The other one is empty.

Depression.

 The wounds of my judge lie open

I mop but blood abounds. He sees

Me, he remembers me—

And every morning he awakens and he 

Drinks a cold lake of brandy. Once he’s done you can see a depression in the mud where maybe

A meteor landed—or a great beast fell

Fighting for its life. Through the

Sinews of his unconsciousness he sees me

In the quiet of my room.

Off the clock.

There are moments after sunset

Off  the clock

When I find a mouse Tinto killed while

I was at work. I don’t dream about misery.

I dream about Tinto sitting in the pelvic bough

Of a peach tree,

He’s looking down at me with his grey poem 

Left by the couch.

And I am the bounty.