on a late night out
on the corner of Broome and Mulberry,
the streets filling up with darkness

as you wrap your arms
around my red-stilettoed silence.
its only melody would be the swell

of a gray-green Atlantic
breaking on the shores from Hatteras
to Westerly, where i wrote names

in the sand. early May was once
a time for love songs, you see, but
i have generally forgotten

how they used to go. so this poem
is just a poem, though it slips
off the tongue like quicksilver,

like that lemonade
we bought from those girls
in Gale’s Ferry, a block from where

you used to live.
this poem and i, we
can appreciate the tang

of memory, its pucker & squint,
just as we do a fear of falling, as if
we were dancers

on a pole at the top of a forty-
floor walkup with one arm flung wide.
it was a dream i had, once,

but whether the pole was hope
or doubt this poem won’t say,
so i am never sure when to let

go & have never yet
learned to whistle. much less
to sing.

this morning, the weather is cooler,
and there is threat
of snow again in the midwest.

there are
heart-shaped messages
in my inbox that aren’t
really hearts, just
numerical symbols
that vaguely remind
of my struggles with multi-
variable calculus.

that was a long time ago. this
morning, the cat
won’t let me work.

he sits on my hip
as i type, scrutinizing
every last alphanumeric
equivocation.

outside,
there are
fast-moving clouds
of i-don’t know-what
kind; they make his tail
twitch and my eyes
wander.

i am thinking
about storms (about you),
about dancing (about me),
about how they ought
to make a good poem

together:
a story of spirals and dervishes,
the solution
to some deceptively
simple equation
that explains the mysteries
of mathematics,
or metaphysics,
or something.

the cat
is a terrible spell-
checker.

we are lulled by
candlestrewn news-

casts into some sense
of wax-puddled forever,

by the delibility
of asphalt footprints

into the tend-
encies to forget.

dripping elegies
for the fallen, we

count cherry-
blossomed blessings

petal by petal like
a lonely child’s game:

he loves me, he
loves me not. we stain

our subconscious
in pink nostalgia,

as if we, too, knew
the sting of April,

as if we could some-
how make it better, as if

by our crying, the world
would be a better place

come May, the cherry
trees then in full bloom.

searching for sincerity
in plastic, we all wish
we were someone else,

tattoo names inside
our cheekbones, hide
our farawayselves

from the loneliness
that creeps into our
laugh lines.

equipped with in-dentured
jawbones, all we taste
are the soundbites, &

pictures, too, lie;
i can filter love
right

into your eyes, you, man-
ufacture scars
with only the sharp of canines,

piercing truths
to string upon a lover’s necklace
like fingerbones from

some primeval fossil
dug up under a harvest moon.
in unadulterated sunlight,

you see, it becomes
harder
to find the poems.

tequila-truths
float to the top
like ice in the glass,
their density more than that
of water, river- or canal- -
would ice float in a tumbler of tears?
i wonder, but the sun
is already slowing,
its journey through
glassless windows
illumining the last
of the graffitied detail, lights on
the guntower (or so you call it;

though surely it was once
an industrial smokestack,
surely…) reflecting
in the slight dark waves.
enough crying, you say,
and we sip on, our
tongues searching
for the edge
of happiness,
the point at which this
boathouse tips. the sun
now well and truly
fallen & the place

full up with suits, we
take our leave; i run
my fingers over the dark
murals of you, feel
the lingering
warmth of cement. we
used to know this place,
the angle of its suns.
now in the dark, in
the wind, i find again
the poems we may
write tomorrow,
and then, and then.

sometimes the guilt is gone for a moment,
and eternities blunted by the marks
of sharp scissors. your questions
i carve into the shape of april:

if we shine lights on the moon,
is the starglow indifferent?
if we make dents in the mattress,
does that make this just

another lust poem?

everyone
looks younger
in love.

we haven’t been
there much,
lately. i count

crows
feet around
your coronaries,

the hard-ish wrinkles
over my veins.
we need more red,

re-awakened
part-sun days,
thornless. river-

mud between
our toes, not
rose but rust-gold

long(ing)-
fingered lenses
through which

all the world
seems wetter and
better for it,

like spring,
like summer
in a mirror

in a cabin
on a side street
by the ocean, yes.

everyone
looks younger
in love.

there is the air
poured
from stale radiator to pool
over bare skin
and open sill.

there is the lament
of a passing train
this side the river. there
is firewood stacked
beside the door, but no

goddamn snow.
it weighs like the hesitation
in her eyes that he
can’t see: that she
is tired of sad poems,

their puckered footsteps like
icefall on the second day
of spring. all ragged clouds
& slush & cold
metaphor. her skin

is forgetful. his hands
are on the small of her.
they weigh like silence,
like stone, like
remembering, brim

with words left
over which long
for un-houred mondays, for
un-hung evers, un-strung lives,
for words which long.

i am writing the same poems
i was before i met you, where,
raining, i was then too pre-

sprung and ungainly and in-
congruent, lofting
plastic smiles

and polysyllabic line-
breaks despite the yellow
of my skirt. alas, you say,

and i like the letters in the word,
how they spell wings
in other tongues, but we

are far from flying,
drown down in our
respective sadnesses,

can’t remember
conjugations or cloud
patterns or what it was

to love easy. it must be
snowing hard, still,
somewhere.

this is how spring comes,
stripes of green between

herring-boned brick, fern-fronding,
bare-armed, broken-eternitied;

mindful. (i am) convalescent,
cognizant of the dragons

that still lean in, hungry.
they bite at me, at

wrists and cheeks and eyes,
blindfully, so that my shape

is not the shape of others, ever.
after dinner, your stereo

won’t work; you ask me to sing, but
i’ve got only that song

where the girl is leaving and the boy
must drop everything to catch her.

(and that is
not us, after all.)

dragons, as everyone knows,
hate the sun. while you are gone, i sit

on the winter-warmed stoop
bare-armed, watching spring come,

scars palely fade, wondering
how this song will end.