Between the Act and the Matter of Fact

When I imagine your wanton whispers

My threadbare tympanum trembles thinly

These days I feel like a tired t-shirt

Hanging grayly from a doorknob 

These days all the words I fling at the world

Narrow fast back upon me

Here in the dry outskirts of profundity

You say that my poems lack

Thematic content of the kind

The word “poetry” in the entire

Virtue of its meaning signifies

Far stars evaporate

Even this mug of tepid tea

Has a faint taint of complaisance

You say that the poet 

Who never uses a past participle

Deserves the eternity he strives for

Everything Lives at Night in Secret Doubt

The hour clothed in remote catastrophes

Has arrived

And here I am

Singing

O my friend

It just so happens that I’m tired of being

In this room of yesterdays

Where you keep a couple hidden thoughts

Yes it’s true that I’m the poet

Who casts irregular shadows

Across your beautiful face

Already there never was a choice

Ideas hop around like toads

Stars vanish

Intransigent flowers

Grind their teeth at the hour of ultimatums

Listen to their sinuous whispers in the dark

Their thin roots that curl like hair

Falling into beds and sinking into pillows

Please take this boutonniere of failed enumerations

Please accept at the top of your lungs

This nosegay of deprecated grammar

It Says It Doesn’t Say

I suppose you’re a genius or something

And that’s why your voice has a green

Patina with just a hint of gloom and gold

It makes me kind of sad but then again

I’m glad to be the fool who has forgotten

Nearly all I ever learned it keeps me

Perpetually surprised hey! look at the way

Tongue-meat sounds its own sense  

The way syllables prevail over words

The way sleep forgets itself and all

The usual things dissipate in its grim

Grammar O my friend I imagine you

Dreaming in dazed garments maybe

Even a quiet smile tangled up in peace

As If Part of Me Were Leaving

Tonight the redbrick streets of Vicksburg

Go serenading

Very gently on the brink of sleep

Something radiates

The heat of a smooth stone

I’d like to stand where your thoughts

Transcribe their passage

Where your hot unharnessed words

Scar my body with the smallest epic

Yet it’s all so unlikely little sweetie

That you’ll ever leave me anything

As heavy as the stone slab of a soul

I’m supposed to be satisfied with

To Learn Impossibility From

Tonight it’s the knife-cold snarl of windows  

That keeps me awake so what? now

The mockingbird is buried now hope flutters

In the drawer where you folded your inflamed

And fragile virginities O shut up it’s just 

Clarity talking isn't it? remember when you

Said I don’t want to die not knowing this is true 
This careless green ubiquity pawing at the gate?

You said I’m tired too of wearing lipstick

That always says it’s tired of being worn

The backyard dogs of October are barking

And here in all this noise quietly passes

Even now those naked footprints—once

I saw you on the floor of my life walking slowly

Then We Rose Up from Dust and Ashes

We the wasted vagrants woke the dawn

We showed the morning where to sit

We lay with rain and fathered fog

We whose womb gave birth to ice

We who mothered frost from night

We did things that never happened

Or were said could never happen

Or appeared to never happen

Or ought not to ever happen

We untethered wild clouds
We cut channels for the downpour

We let loose the weight of waters
We cleared the way for thunderous rivers

We the wind that froze the ocean

We sacked the storehouse stole the hail

We pillaged hell and trod the paths of heat

We put wisdom in the darkness

We planted truth in empty cisterns

We who gave the horse her strength

We corralled the zodiac

We slipped a noose around its tongue

We gave a constellation wings

We released the Pleiades

We unhooked Orion’s belt

We who dwelt in final hours

We fed the months of pregnant days

We brought their offspring to the birth

We watched them grow and thrive and die

We fed vultures we fed crows and flies

If I Don't Appear

Escape the utmost hour don’t

Stop shouting at divine September

Fill the air between a mother’s open hands

Let words fall like footsteps in a stranger's house

Teach a daughter how to fold the years

So neatly in a purse or pocket

Embrace things as Frank O'Hara said

Freely and with the appropriate sense of space

Kick leaves

Scatter platitudes across a broad lawn

Speak strangely sonorous names

Say perhaps the last day never ends this hazy

Be unforeseen forty paces hence give

Life to small things you can’t remember

Ask for just one bullet preferably silver

Press a blade against the glittering river

Fly a kite into the burnished clouds

Glowing in your sunglasses

To Appear Among Your Many Convolutions

So many things I don’t dare tell you

Like how these flies meander toward some

Deeper understanding and everywhere hail

Waits to fall on your ocean and on the yellow

Town of your girlhood where cats creep

Like oily tufts of smoke so many things

To be consummated so much to forgive

Let other people gather valley flowers

Let them smile with grandiose ambiguity

So many moments from another life so many

Yellow lands I named for you so many poems

I sewed for you from my mauve scars

So many shadows reach tonight the step

You hear stops when you start laughing