#20

I set them up in rows, assigned them numbers on the dateline, splinters. It was that forbidden knowledge, lurid apple luring. Turned time into space, pacing into time. Like to a bold sharpe Sophister, secret agent of the crown. His stepwork on the nation-edge. And the well rising suddenly in his path.

Forswear the poets wrapped in socialist garb, who taught men to build cities, fight wars on common ground. Orpheus with his fist to the muse. Musaeus and the taskmaster's song. Dreamers. Bedded rulers. Measured meanings of their sight as ransomed children. Slaughtered children. Their limbs in systems gesticulate, delight.

Die Sachen selbst. A lie for those not strong enough to make believe. Herders and owners alike. Readers who prefer pages stiff, ink dry that crumbles. One beginning or the other. The circle of consensus tracing geophantic trends. Authors naught but mountains. Passed. I'm done with philosophy, said the poet (me). Let my writing be as spotlesse as my youth.

#19

Context for the faithful, so much apocrapha cluttering closet space. The heretical bell. The green bandana of one's past Narcissus. Wood charmed by quiet hands. The author's mark in books. Solar art for the dearly departed. And photographs - all of them blasphemy.

Time's offence. Partitioned, fields and cuttings. Different routes on maps hand-drawn. Un-enfoldings in contiguity. Apocrapha: a bazaar beyond the fence where stories are as purchased from their swindlers. Fairy tunes careening round yesteryead. Silver whistles, silver poets. Memory drank in jugs under sun. Children braised in blue-bell bowls of synesthesia.

The sex of every false moon will flee our visions. We who walk brambled paths through woods half-dead to homes of doors in clearings. Free spirits ensuite who commune in graveyards. Pens to flame. Or eyes to print. A petal plucked for nesting. And when the pagan for the whole, and when the lender for his own... We will count their souls on string. We will sing at each and every rending.

#18

The rain came, expiation. Cloud-gray with it, slate-still, light upon the oriental carpet of the third-floor study. The photographic subject there in multiple. A choir in every limb-long pose. Olive-pink, stray freckles. Lines of hair from chest to sex. Curved nimbus round each ass. A soft-porn haze of camera-work trickery.

A reverent silence among twisting torsos. Stitched in white thread.

(The fold of yourself on yourself. Full lips as full lips, and your own.)

#17

At dinner, two nights ago, with Matt: You were, you said, a calculated disaster. Language like debt, a bike ride through August in crowds, the smell of sex in cellars without you. You could, you said, hardly speak, except in portents, the nightly news. The turn of profit. Always the bankroll to my Cassandra. A tiger poised. The leash you did not see, you said, was knowledge.

Ah, how I heard it though, the snap of your heart at midnight as your cock slid into me then, your lover above me with lust on his tongue. Frenzy. Your accent never quizzacle. The moonlight, caustic through the blinds. What you had mortgaged ease. I bore with my own tears, a murdered doppleganger, legs up in flowers. A mirror with my quiver, quivering cold. Nights with you so dark I saw nothing, and rejoiced.

Now you are, you said, to Matt over dessert, another kind of gap. Too sorry to order backwards. And Josh, just a boy, plain and simple, whom you loved. More fragile now, with wine. Translating. The interrogative. Another man, without salve, save for taciturn. And you stutter. And you wince. And all the moments of the past two years rise up in adumbration: some non-phenomenon you could not bear witness to. I am, you said to Matt, getting better, I think, slowly.

And Matt, dressed in flashing smile, oregano laugh bubbling, told all of this to me. Half hearted, without weight. His own turn, turning him dizzy. Out the door. As I imagine you crying, and am proud. You now like a poem I wrote in possession but never handed to you. "Linger in front of open windows," I wrote. Let your heart throw itself in despair.

#16

There on the Walnut Street Bridge at dusk as it drizzled, your form bent over the railing, hands clasped downwards toward the river, a processesion of pixels blue-grey beneath.


There on the Walnut Street Bridge at dusk as it drizzled, your form bent over the railing, hands clasped downwards toward the river, a processesion of pixels blue-grey beneath.


There on the Walnut Street Bridge at dusk as it drizzled, your form bent over the railing, hands clasped downwards toward the river, a processesion of pixels blue-grey beneath.


There on the Walnut Street Bridge at dusk as it drizzled, your form bent over the railing, hands clasped downwards toward the river, a processesion of pixels blue-grey beneath.


There on the Walnut Street Bridge at dusk as it drizzled, your form bent over the railing, hands clasped downwards toward the river, a processesion of pixels blue-grey beneath.


This is how I imagined you, Blake, long before I loved you, in a novel I would never write, conceived on a silent walk home through the city at midnight. How strange for you not to have left that pose. For me to find you there, still, today...

#15

Old friends, I urge to misplace you. The negative, that itch, in the pass of the wizard's wand. Beautiful suicide. As on Easter Sunday. All the cognition you carry breaking against time. The again no longer corresponding. Amity the deepest mourning. My face, unaccountable. Surprise. The past nonsense, a rend in the heart of cunning, ever personal in its reason. A telos surpassed abruptly, without fanfare or consequence. Two then, I and I, the I not even enough to refuse the two. The mammoth difference. Without even a term to situate.

Old friends, it's for you this urge. So that, sitting across from me, on a couch with a mug of milk in hand, the span would not slacken in trust. The glint of my eyes be more than the bend of light. You would stutter instead of speak, reach out as if at ghosts, become a child in tears before me. "You've changed," you'd whisper. "You've changed." And you will have changed likewise. No history left between us. No coils of pleasure entwined. You will be you again, and I me. And for the first time, we will know each other as friends.

#14

He was forgetful of his origin, created from pen and paper, left in writing except when called for. A figment of the mind, no phusis. Less given than a dream, adequate without profile. The coat rack, the milk container - all so much being, having known without him. Erased in every clearing. History without decision. I named him Lucas, and made him my friend.

"Ludic," Lynda said, and accepted. She did not dispute him nor know him, but in flashes. That summer, when the branches hung low as sex organs.

Lucas, who walked with me that day to the clinic, a trail of make believe in tow. Who gave me his hand as death circled. Your blonde, your gray, the white of snow through the window where you were born. Paragraph three. The unbleached page left open, as you ran among the trees I did not mention. And later, the secret you hid for me: a spell for Blake on Valentines'. Oh, Lucas don't forget me! For I haven't forgotten you. Your innocence ever a beacon. Never my mark. But Lucas! Your difference indescribable.

#13

My, my things were bad in September. Behind storefronts. And old schoolrooms. The turn of telephones to vitriol. The gerund always finding itself past. "Everything begins," wrote no one, in graffitti, by the lot. Such rash and blush. The stomache of my lover jutting over briefs. The slur of ceiling fan and rain. White violence, lurid noise. Fuck me, until I'm nothing but a hole.

Back then, I dressed to kill. Breathing was a sign of surrender. Proxy, indebtedness. Proxy. One crawls because memory beamed. Sentinel, and its fires set on floors below. Too ancient already to be hurt. At podiums. In triplicate. But what could I say? I told of nights so beautiful, one needn't even mention the moon. I sculpted mobiles in the bathroom and bled.

On laptops in closets. In cabinets that slide. In empty condos, lapping tongues, my ass exposed to the spread of hands and air. The watchword. Do not motion toward the night. The sitting, like Job, in repetition. Deface one's God in mourning. The souvenirs cramped in boxes bound for cellars. The inscription one tries to disown. Don't forget, my genius sang. A memory in multiple pleading.

#12

Every poem a Bestimmung: you or you or you. For I will be I only then, at the beginning of beginnings, the movement from you moving me into mine, and poetry the echo of that primal kinaesthesia. As in dreams, where no play of consciousness exceeds the theft of my home, mine for the taking, and in.

#11

Someone had posted a sign. "Missing," it read: "My cat." Throughout town, people opened windows, planted bulbs in flower beds. Children raced in swerving circles by the forest's edge. The sun. Less reticent. Bodies arched in fantasy upon couches at lunchtime, pants bunched around ankles. Trees budding patiently. Much talk of nothing over phone lines. Expanded proximity.

All the weeds discontent, from secret burrows lined with mud. The bicycles! Separating here from there. Dime store candy sweating in the sidewalk sun. All equivalence slowly finding names. Jeff and Ryan: video games for the hoop and ball. Karen, too old!, hid and sought beside the river. Friends. The office window of the hospital, a languid mirror of becoming.

Oh, is it spring? The crowding in of passive past in breezes? Sweating slightly in silent longing: limbs unfolded over others, the knotted sheets of light reflected. Genitals tired and wet from loving. The music of whole lives with nothing to be done, but smell of sex and honeysuckle. Teenage boys at dusk in parking lots. Mothers slipping into dresses. An organon of bodies rising as in novels, sinking as in death. Is it spring? Listen to music instead. The spell will part curtains upon the past.

#10

Become a beacon to spirit-sounds. Receive, from God, his grandeur. If you walk, as you did then, down Western tracks, let them lead you to the clearing. Write poems. "My father is as quiet as a winter morning." "The voices bloom, which once I thought were dead." Be Diana's child. Mezereon in bunches. Find your pleasure in the throb of horse flesh twixt your thighs. And bleed with the squack of birds at dawn.

Whole worlds lost to the mediate. Memory. A tourist's picture book. The lure of the making barring the passage of strangers. Even Christ now, no longer his visit in the pasture. What Bill said. Now. Instead. And later. All this given to another, who will leave it in turn. The wheel stripping death of its flavor. Your children some day like rags. A spring cleaning that will resent you.

Let's make a vow. I will collect from your wake what you have discarded for the sake of movement. I will become the you that you aufhebt, your very conquering of loss. I will sing your songs, and write your past, as you take your place in the shine of sun. In Eastern lands, ever familiar. Where you cry, in your solitude, for childhood. I will murder you, each night as you sleep, a sacrifice for your sake, and paint pictures with your blood of nothing. They will find you each day dismembered. I will give you back to time.

#9

Would I these words were woods, thick and pathless. My ardour less stern than solitude. All the prose withdrawn by nature, the herding in and about the land. All those forgotten births, abandoned footprints from the weeds. At dusk, at dawn, at the time of flaming stars. Vesitigia.

I walked, as a child, to the empty river bed, past a snarl of ragged branches, slope of prodigal green, the wall of needles ten feet deep. The furrow, strewn with trash, the broken bottles of ancient fugitives, teenage boys run off from the hearth to drown. I waited whole days there on blankets with books, watched blankly for hours the clouds. Jerked off, when the wind teased, in thin strings that glistened upon garbage and dirt. I told stories to the birds and the beetles.

All that sufficed to fill the days with presence, still not enough for my yearning for more than breezes. The night there full of strangers imagined in black, unshorn faces hiding secrets near the trees. Their argot written in whispers, whole poems left naked in the dark. The wandering that I never could do. Through fingers fresh with earth as they bent and broke over boulders the arch of their desire. There I could never be a child, always an orphan too old. Too close, the wound. And all my longing swallowed with the sun. I locked doors, hid under bedclothes, heard the rustle of leaves through windows, and dreamt of men in masks come to murder me with thunder.

#8

I stood to gain much more than lose, so sat to wile the time. Warped mirrors on my writing desk to hedge and deploy my subject. Oh, Grace from Grace where perfit Grace remain'd, with nary a name to signal: I write in full bemusement, am besot, and gesture falsely fore and aft, and never attend my muse! My hands are stationed far from my thighs. Whatever wine is spilt tonight will find its private drain. The way colors become words. Luculent. Epicene. Simular. And all is non-ubiquity.

I've walked that curving path. Then, back then when the flame was snuffed, my ears plugged so as to miss the eulogy. A Gaveston on motorbike, a Circe and her lamb. Come meet her, silent now - where are you? The shirtless skies and flaccid morns. The treason wet with bilge and metaphor. Snake oil, poems and such. My endless abnegation from the concert floor. The moon, I would say, was a fingernail. Or a gouge. But no one heard such things.

"Give me a moment to denude," he said, denuded in the stairwell black. As Icarus lolled in the land above the clouds, where night is never known and truth is the warmth of day. There is no dissembling there: no poetry, and no love. No death to stalk us with flowers. Patience is made for the world below, imperfect forms to mark the hours, language that hides and seeks with coos. And the readers? They put in what the author's put out. Countering a riddle with a rhyme. That first and last you did vouchsafe to see. Translating hues. And taking the place of no one to listen to the absence that is yours. I know, yes I know. Ariadne took her thread out, after all, from the hope chest filled with treasure. The secret? It was a lasso.

#7

On the other side of time, I danced to the clamor of church bells. I erased my mark from stars and street lamps and the wisps of cloud creeping towards the moon. Everywhere, I found doors. Altogether, the many I had met in the dark. Walk briskly. And disappear from view. The sound of others' songs. Antony at the curtain, weeks ago. Like a bird, young and too far from the nest. "Confuse your hunger, capture the fate."

Or a plane, in evening glide, the cabin a spattering of reading lights and jackets wedged as pillows. How I'd like to be there now, still and cramped, asleep in discomfit by your side. A boy, long ago, at the piano. Or the window. And the flute, propped against the glass. As the rain came over fields, and the ghosts of comic books and fairy tales beckoned from the forest and the river behind. Actaeon at the gate, the ranger now, and solemn. I took you there to see.

Oh, my muses, living and dead! Let your night, this night, be yours. Frolic on broad plateaus. Sit in bars with common tongues. Dream uninspiring dreams, and sing on empty streets as you journey home alone. Be as children, mother and father dressing you in olive leaf. kissing you goodnight in the grotto wreathed with pine. For you, I will write with an empty heart, no genius to translate into poetry. Promise me your ownmost, now, a sudden. Promise me you'll keep it with yours in passing.

#6

The aples haunt the maphid tree. They're an overdetermined plague. In the study, by the mirror, where the author poses, limbs akimbo, and goodnight. The tea cools unnoticed by the radiator. Riven, a winter varietal. A digestive aid. One's memory is a snowglobe bought at the giftshop of a lighthouse one read of once in a novel. It is a collector's privilege. I've given, at least, you that.

Every book, a gift. Every gift, a parasite. And you, who huddled in the empty black of a building recalcitrant to warmth, choral works the wallpaper distempered. How many nights spent cramped in blankets, the future mortgaged to the past? In my novel I paint you crying, a spotlight your fragility flickering dimly through obscuro. And yet the termites burrow. They're carving a space for nothingness.

I wanted to say what I said. At the site I meant to ward. To think, of thou and thou, to separate the two. Collect and restitute. To slave for what was lost, the child always running to the man. Remember, at any cost. Posit an exit wound. Lie, in love, with another. The due of thine, down payment for the mortise. Your realtor, a ladybug, her eyes, each one, an abbess, who will swallow up your past.

#5

In my dream, he was standing by the bougainvillea, digital camera in hand. "I've come to take pictures of everyone but you." He was hard to criticize, so wound in scarves and anxious curves he was. Plus, his angles were wrong. He never noticed the sky though it pressed with menace beside him. His horizon was narrow and axiologically impaired.

"Heed my warning," I said, but had no voice nor tongue. The beetles were busy with the dead. And the land tilted, that bystander, its southern slope congregating in the East. Which hides his life, and shows not half his parts. That I did not dig nor seek to steal. Love's prose too binding and resilient to mistake it for the literary.

"My father was a fail-ed man, whom nature made too free. A printer by profession learned, his heart made not to breed. Alas, alack, he is my sire, and I his duty done. Wisdom, beauty and release to let me have his fun. I have no tale myself to tell, but carry out his line; I am desire manifest and his desire mine. As all will read, who enter me, the sundry tome of time."

This was his confession, made four years ago, from his bedroom loft adorned with shadows. I stood hesitant on the ladder beside it. "I've never told that to anyone," he said. And the curtains lifted suddenly, the April wind rushing through his apartment, the scent of the hyacinth I placed on his desk carried up, up, until the ceiling. "I love you," I said. And I did. But that was years ago.

#4

#3

In media res, the morning, before, begins. Cups of coffee - again, again - that steam from table tops, from fronts of shelves, or hands (my own, another's). And the light that falls falsely. Through what? A tiny square of glass, dissimulating springtime. And the steam that catches it, and corruscates, and incants in silent, early tones.

Or start perhaps in darkness. That bed, floor-ridden, where he turned. As I crept, seconds early to the clock. Keep silence, keep silent. Though winter does its worst to windows drafty.

#2

I watched her from the rowboat: folded arms, head cocked. White paint flaking from the beach house wall behind. “I’ll win you,” he said, “a prize.” Brother to the sister in photograph pose. The ferris wheel tilted towards the sea. Was it there, in suburban coves, the clearing of sandstrewn gardens? The sun, capped, extending hands. Down to the fun house with its swooping birds. Erik’s toy men poised over picnic table precipices.

“They are for you,” smirked my father. Cool grass and bees. The darkness of summer that crept. There, my red sweatshirt fluttered on a fencepost. While the revelers: launching lights past orange clouds. He disappeared, head covered, into the night of noises. Books and bedrooms, boys below, and parting. She crossed her arms, hair in breezes: up the stairs and after.

Teeter upon the landing. Flares and fire, the airborne spectacle and families watching. The work looked down, and to see it, look up. From the hill, toward the carnival shadows. Measure the contents of pockets, change. Or sit by lamplight sounding words. Rhyme and rhyme, again and turn. Will you part, as time does, and remember? Heads raised toward where she reads. Or with his knife, you might carve things into trees.

#1

The weather, a smear of winter in my springtime. Cleaning. What horizons? They're forgotten. And "selectivity," he said, "is the schema of friendship." I subscribed and subscribed again, numbered 48, and alerted security.

For they were they in the sunshine, slaves unrespited of low pursuits. I was another. God, the mystery, a resonance resounding behind the background. I had a credit card. A stack of library books. And almond cookies, when it rained, which it did, too often.

My mother was an archivist, inherent and inspired, and ardent in her love of things prosaic. A ship at sea. Of whom Les once wrote in a letter, "worried we were by the forest: wandering, wandering, wandering." I remember the flanks, the parting of wood by sky, the birches that sloped towards day.

You were dead. And I walked with you to the river, where you gave to me my story. It was a sapling. Yggradsil. "Water it with . . ."