Your breath, a white net, a gossamer veil
falling into the dark waters beside
your hand. Your hand, a coral branch, a gray
comb, now parting the curtains from your eyes.
Your eyes, two halos, fire-ringed coronas
beaming bright as moons against the blue skin
of your face. Your face, a cobalt opal,
a smooth luminescent stone balancing
upon your shoulders. Your shoulders, a wood
frame, a cross buried in the sand, pressing
into your spine. Your spine, a marble road,
a long porcelain serpent constricting
around your womb. Your womb, a burning house,
a violet light pluming into your mouth.

You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.
I’m not deceived by your far-off gaze
or the canted edges of your smile.

The gods confer—perhaps they are beguiled
enough to send the animals your way.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

The geese and rabbits shadow you awhile
as we converse or kiss—they can’t but stray
to the canted edges of your smile.

With this, you resurrect the god of wine,
the moribund branch, the shriveled grape.
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild.

In Eros / Thanatos, you grant new life—
Prometheus flickers in your gaze
and the canted edges of your smile.

I can’t resist the revels—half a child,
half a beast—who needs the right to say:
You’re predisposed to attracting the wild
with the canted edges of your smile.

I. American Jeremiad

“I love a martini, two at the most. Three – I’m under the table; four, I’m under the host.”
– Dorothy Parker
(The Algonquin Hotel, 1929)

Shakespeare is dutifully remembered
for his plaintive sonnets and perfect plays.
We are ruined by his genius, forever
at a loss to be adequately pained.
Today, we are on the opposite side
of Elizabethan diction; we brood
in prosaic tones and truncated lines,
we cheer blandness and raise brandy balloons
to Sandburg, Hemingway, Williams, and Frost,
those cryptic purveyors of emptiness
who’ve dulled the edges of our lips and thoughts.
Should we remix their drinks, I would request
this recipe: a splash of Whitman’s Dick,
& a dash of Emily Dickinson’s Wit.

II. Pre Profundis: The Ballad of Hyacinthus and Marsyas

“Those whom the gods love grow young.”
– Oscar Wilde
(Cadogan Hotel, April 5, 1895)

How I hate that unfathomable boy,
who pretended to love me in the guise
of a man! He has robbed me of all joy,
my good name, and my fortune with his lies.
And yet, he was a celestial body
devouring light, bending me to his will:
I was wittingly drawn to the dark rings
of that moon, the circumference of my hell.
Now gilded snakes pervade my dreams; they slip
with cool abandon down my bed to sleep
and brush the trembling reaches of my lips.
Nysaeans—why have you forsaken me?
For Apollo kissed that indolent youth,
then flayed my skin for blowing on a flute.

III. The Idea of Disorder at Key West

“By God, I wish I had that Hemingway here right now!
I’d knock him out with a single punch!”
– Wallace Stevens
(Casa Marina, 1935)

Oh! Blessed rage for order—pale Ramón!
Papa is a friend of Dionysus,
as are we—let us tip our hats to him,
as well our cups: to the Bull of Minos
on this isle of bones, who sloshes about
its shallow reefs! I give this humble toast
to dull his roar beyond our pink redoubt
which mists the trawlers idling on the coast
and drapes their empty decks with silver foam.
Let us conspire to lure him with a string
of hyacinths beside his water hole,
that stretch from our veranda to the sea.
I’ll don my mask, you tune your pithy lyre:
the Maenads fan their cocktails by the fire.

IV. Delirium Tremens

“A straw hat on, my eyes flushed, might I resemble the former
preacher who painted a pool table and then maimed himself?”
– Rush Rankin
(Descanso Beach Club)

The seaweed bends with the ocean, a field of women
kneeling, then standing row upon row, as if to offer
a benediction to the shore. Already I forget I am
floating in this frigid Catalina water,
not some ghost surveying southern France—
nor an ominous crow or a half-mad painter
scanning a landscape after a pint of absinthe—
A boat circles above me, the black chain from its anchor
stretches like an umbilical cord to the blanched florets
of coral below. The motor hums. A large woman peers
over the side as I ascend, her distorted contours
growing in and out of focus—and I am free,
more so than Van Gogh waking in Saint Rémy,
a dark habit caressing his cheek.

V. Dionysus Spikes the Ball

“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones, run in packs
like the primal horde.”
– Camille Paglia
(Caribbean coast of Mexico)

The mermaids swing their bodies beach
to beach—like skipping stones that never sink;
they don’t suspect how far the rip tides reach
or how the sea is seething as they drink.
The Marquis purrs when hipbones slap the waves—
a gasp, a jolt, a laugh that could seduce;
Camus would note a stranger learns to crave
the shine of sweat that justifies abuse.
The boys—like oiled gods in mirrored shades—
strike statues in the surf, each sweaty boast:
a promise made of flesh the sun remakes;
Dionysus leaps and hammers down the post.
Those hips, that heat, that final feral act:
a scholar licks the salt off every fact.

VI. Do Not Go Quiet

“I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that’s the record.”
– Dylan Thomas, on the eve of his passing
(White Horse Tavern, Greenwich Village, 1953)

I will not sip the dark. I drink it neat—
Four Roses, please, poured quick—no word to waste.
Your bar keeps tilting, free of gravity
or is it me, untethered to this time and space?
The mind draws tight, a star to single grain,
then breaks—rose-bright, galactic, drunk with sound;
Not truth, but song flung hard against the pain
of knowing breath must spend itself, unbound.
I will not sip the dark. I drink it down.
The night still answers when I strike the bar.
My breath comes bright; my blood refuses crown
or calm—this pulse outshouts the dying star.
What’s that—my breath is neither galaxy nor rose?
A pox on both—pour on. I’ll drink until you close.

VII. Shiduri’s by the Sea

“Beside the sea she lives, the woman of the vine, the maker of wine.”
– Shin-eqi-unninni

My tavern is exclusive and discreet,
the customers irregular at times;
some drink from flasks of lapis lazuli
while others tip bejeweled carafes of wine.
Above the bar I dedicate a frame
to every famous patron I have served—
that’s Ea on the left, a tortured mage,
who drowned his sorrows when he drowned the Earth.
The Stone Men used to come on Saturday
to numb their week of service on the ship—
they were a stoic lot, but always paid
until one client smashed them all to bits.
He said his name was Gilgamesh, I think—
he crushed the pink umbrella in his drink.

VIII. Taken, With a Twist

“That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can’t say No in any of them.”
— Alexander Woollcott, on Dorothy Parker
(The Algonquin Hotel, Oak Bar, 1920)

“Pour me a gin that’s educated in sin.”
—How earnest. I prefer mine taught to ply.
I drink what makes a decent woman grin.
—I drink what leaves the decent woman dry.
Then let’s proceed. I favor discipline.
—Only if learned. You must go slow.
I never rush. I like my damage driven in.
—Good. I collect what lingers after “no.”
And when it burns, do you deny the fire?
—I file it, darling. Names are tools.
I name what breaks me just to watch it tire.
—Then order well. The glass remembers fools.
“God’s Promise?” Or “The Devil’s Repast.” A spark
flared up when she leaned in: “I never experiment in the dark.”

The Japanese gave immanence to age,
a furtive magic in the oldest cat,
or so says Zack at the Meow Café—
headset mic askew. A special breed, to be exact,
of courtesan and kitten—a lineage spanning
Hello Kitty to yokai. He notes such prostitutes
were often found by customers covertly
choking down a fish, a dark rebuke
against desire’s aftermath. And then:
a Classic Persian jabs its paw
from a fuzzy peephole near Zack’s head,
precursor to the playful clause
that curiosity—the bane of cats—
can also kill a writer’s act.

He fell off the balustrade, another
small misstep toward glory, just one among
the litany of injuries my brother
has endured during his short life—each one
a peculiar work of art, prosaic
yet absurd. He’s the jester of martyrs,
the black comic who has enough nicks,
gouges, and breaks to have suffered,
all told, one fatal round of martyrdom.
More Buster Keaton than St. Teresa,
(whose beatific guise belies marble
but still does not suspend my disbelief)
he laughs, doubled over in the front yard,
then tries to walk, stumbling toward sainthood.

Queen Pasiphaë is redeemed by the sword
when she hears her child’s echo in the cave—
not unlike her shrieks in the wooden beast
when she braced under the white bull’s shadow.
Now, justly induced by her daughter’s thread
and hand, her bastard son’s assassin weaves

in and out of the labyrinth, he weaves
more deftly than a needle with his sword,
piercing the darkness at each turn, the thread
leading his hands to the mouth of the cave—
soon Theseus will emerge, his shadow
reconfigured in the light, and the beast

now a story upon his lips, the beast
reduced to a tapestry that he weaves
from the edge of his unraveling shadow.
Yet still its blood is hot upon his sword
as he is running blindly through the cave,
his left palm scorched by Ariadne’s thread.

His left palm burns from Ariadne’s thread
as he is running blindly through the cave
to draw its blood, hot upon his sword,
and join the remnants of his own shadow.
Reduced to a tapestry he later weaves,
a story brimming on his lips, the beast

is reconfigured in his mind: the beast
and Theseus will converge, their shadows
reeling back and forth within the cave,
facing darkness at each turn, the thread
then deftly wending under hoof and sword
along the labyrinth’s edge. He weaves

through night, the bastard son’s assassin weaves
fatefully led by Ariadne’s thread,
he lunges under the minotaur’s shadow
as Pasiphaë once braced under Daedalus’ beast.
She hears her child’s echo in the cave:
Queen Pasiphaë is redeemed by the sword.

The wheat glistens in the September sun,
as bright as the fine hairs along the cheek
of a girl who points at the horizon,
where the sky and her index finger meet,
tracing the long line of her origin.
She anticipates the expanding flames
from the earth, her incandescent prison,
that vast, infinitely shimmering plain
of light undulating in the north wind,
which spills into the corners of the room
when she opens the long yellow curtains.
Combing her hair by the window, she moves
as deliberately as a composer,
her blonde rows now burning in the warm air.

collapses and the corporeal flames
flicker long into the evening,
when wind collects bits of ash and makes
the tips of the blackened fields glow. She
will arrive soon, intemperate and
invisible, to inter her breath
within the broken houses of men.
She has been present since words and myths
were realized, and gods were conceived
to enforce them, holding the courses
of temple and water, steadying
the trees as they gripped the shifting earth
with their knotted hands. She was at rest
in the white sails of man’s first conquest.