Dog

We put the dog to sleep when
she started to have seizures
that sent her fish-like onto
the tile floors.

At your parents' house in
Dallas I cried for twenty
minutes as you held me against
your dress soaking through
the thin blue cloth of your heart.

Two months later at my
grandfather's funeral
in Portland it was
all spent.

Shadow Tricks

I see your shape in crape myrtles and anything
bone thin. Thinking of you as winter comes
degrades both of us because I broke
you at the turn every season, so often
wondering whether age would transfigure
you to bloom or if you would ride the ridges
of your disaster to their termination point.

I never knew why it wasn't enough
to just share the pockets of a coat with you
standing out there in your backyard
watching the crepuscular light play
shadow tricks on the rippling lake.

That evening, you told me
that bare trees pressed
against the sky looked to you
like the dendrites in the brain

lit up
county fair style

and, yesterday, I read something
similar in a book.

But it is getting harder to separate
you from your teleology and remember
all those nights when we were the only
living things in Texas who even bothered
to smile.

Untitled in October

Whenever our lips part
ways all I want to do
is the autumn

Insomnia Poem

There is something spectacular humming
in the wall's copper wires, something more
than carbon dioxide making the bubbles
in the drinks so round. These stimulants
don't do their job anymore so it's the
adrenaline kisses that are keeping us
awake: the way your earrings through
barely open eyes look like shattered
chandeliers while I'm out on the porch
kissing your neck catching the light.

There is a moment every night
when someone looks up from their drink,
saying, "This can't be real life, can it?”
and I always think: “Man, real life must
have been miserable.”

Clutter

You were careful and there were bees
somewhere buzzing, murmuring their
truths from a corner of the room
to fill up my ears

or was that just
your breath
in its sheer animation?

There is moonlight white as your skin
when you're grinning at nothing in particular a smile
straight off silver celluloid, giving you away.

And if you feel like looking
you can keep anything of value
you might find in between
the clutter and the vacancy
of my heart.

Season Poem

I wait for you awhile in
coming autumn smoking
a remaining third or half a cigarette
underneath amber streetlamp flowers
blooming out of tune around me.
I have been quitting in fragments.

With secrets in my pockets
no one would be interested in anyhow
and my heart dressed in a three piece suit
for you

my intentions pop corks
of champagne bottles loud
enough to wake the neighbors
Either too crass
or too subtle and I can never
tell the difference
between the accumulation
and dissipation of stars.

But either way, tonight they are
suspended in anticipation
of whose bed I end up in.

Either way, their light
may as well be you

blushing.

Bird

Now that I am incapable of telling stories that do anything but rebreak your heart
I sit inside and stitch together umbrellas from the slips of women who tell me that
they love me but can't have anything to do with me.

A new poignancy will arrive tomorrow on the back of an unnamed bird.
It will wear its hair blond . Convex curves
of thigh and hip built to compliment
the empty arches of my hands.

Meanwhile
outside in the rain
the whole world is struggling
to keep their cigarettes dry.