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.

Sink Poem

You brush your teeth
even though you don't want to
after kissing her—knowing you're
too old for the perfection of a girl
to keep you from routine necessities.
And, spitting in the basin, you notice
for the first time that beneath the froth
of pink fluoride there is an inscription
on the metal ring around the stopper that
reads “Chicago Sink Company.” It makes you
smile like some idiot—lost in pleasure
at that simple precision.

Imagine:
how very slender
how very graceful
the tools and the hands
that engraved it.

Object

The waking up to television
static, to the record left on.
Since the music ran out
at four the needle has
circled black center—for once
allowed to sing of
its own inanimate pleasures.

The waking up same-clothed
but a stranger in the sunlight.

Remembering
those two who kissed on your
porch, glasses in hand.
How the Night's tense
shoulders relaxed and turned
buttery.

She was on
their side the
whole time
Vicariously present
in their new
skin.

Blushing for them:
the hues of her helium
and nitrogen
tempering the the vast
mascara blackness of
her complexion because
it has been so long since
she was young enough
to be loved.

Panama #3

When I almost died
in those waves I crawled
out of the ocean like it was
the first time—something evolved
and nameless. Squinting in the
unfiltered sun, coughing up seawater
on to the sand in the shape of your
face or of God's, I sat on the dunes
and wrote you a postcard. It may have
been a concussion. I didn't want to sleep.

Panama #2

I am
reminded of you while
reading Jack Gilbert, skating
by bus through teeming
mountains. The volume is
yours: one of the innumerable
borrowed and few I have
yet to destroy. There
are depressions though
on the sheen of
the front cover. Evidence
of a shuddering carelessness
endemic to me, my propensity
to set things down
so hard without
even looking.

When you
still loved me I would lie
in your bed while you
got ready to go out drinking, reading
poems one at a time. I wanted
to feel the weight of those words
on my tongue, dissolving
like hard candies to ropes
of sucrose that would thread
between my teeth. I never
understood why you would prefer
films to photographs
when isn't it always motion that turns
everything to shit?

Now I see
your perspective. Collections
bring cohesion, you were always
the most beautiful while dancing
and without narrative
what remains is a vase
without flowers--that sort of felt
idealism you never
believed in anyhow.

But darling, the same way
I pray it is not a sin to
read while so much rushes
past the windows, I pray
you were wrong about certain things.

That Panama is nothing
like Belize. That I did
love you even in the moment
when my hands so deftly
pulled us apart. That I will
not shatter the next
beautiful thing
I touch, and how
maybe there is
a pair of kid gloves
hidden somewhere
in your deepest
chest of drawers.