Why was I so compelled, that speaking those
words, I felt a shift—some tacit wheel
turning in the current of our lives?
I’m no mystic. Such visions do not heal.
I’m secretly bourgeois. Do I love you?
I want to be an ascetic—slip the rope,
step from the ledger of desire and rue,
leave little but a name, a fact, a hope.
From Siddhartha to Schopenhauer, all
nihilism keeps its counsel in the dharma:
Desire is the root of suffering—the small
and local truth behind this mantra:
Why was I so compelled, those words released?
A current broke. Something reversed. Or ceased.

 

 

I tell myself the house is only wood,
old nails, a roof that leaks when God feels bored.
But every dusk it tilts—a confessional door
ajar—inviting and accusing. You stood
at the kitchen counter, haloed the way
cheap bulbs sanctify a lover leaving.
I watched the terrazzo patterns weave
our shadows, even as they pulled away.
Forgive me—though I never learned for what.
My tongue still tastes of penny metals, sin’s
small currency. “We’re fine,” I said, the thin
lie cracked like plaster in a too-cold spot.
And just like that, the evening filled the room,
light receding from a familiar wound.

I write this with the sun behind my back,
flat on a chipped green table—rough Formica
cold as a hospital tray. I stalled, the brightest
flecks reflecting light like sins I can’t retract.
“Can you be saved?” you asked. Christ—your knack
for dissecting me—and my maniacal
habit of drafting grief into a mythical
shape—left me split between attack
and retreat. What’s needed, I suppose,
is not revision—just the truth: how women
draw us in with that unguarded pose,
the grace note just before the guillotine. Again
I tried to mend the poem, stitch its prose—
but what won’t live won’t rise. Amen. Amen.

 

“Never say that marriage has more of joy than pain.”

-Euripedes

 

I. The Estranged Wife

 

A poem needs rooms, it needs the conceit

of a history. Seal this history

in an envelope, push it underneath

a lonely woman’s door. Make it evening.

Give her things she can use: a living room,

a fireplace, a small lamp on a table,

a telephone, a window, the moon,

a row of photographs on the mantel.

Sometime after midnight, the telephone

will ring. When she answers, she may study

the pictures, then come to a conclusion.

Her left ear is warm. She is listening.

Every picture is a discrete moment

which has indiscreetly lost its moment.

II. Twilight of the Idols

 

The day passes, the autumn light slanting

through the blinds and onto the window ledge

as the sun tangents the tips of the trees.

Our two black cats hide underneath the bed

when an airplane passes in the distance,

its low rumble lingering in the sky

then tapering slowly into silence

along with the last vestiges of light.

The neighborhood dogs bark in unison

at some indiscernible animal

and the blue glow of the television

casts cobalt shadows on the bedroom wall.

I pull you toward me to kiss your neck,

your cold back pressing against my stomach.

III. The Lucid Husband

 

The moon crystallized to sugar last night,

Ants crawled over its surface, gathering

in craters, visible to naked eyes.

It was shaping into a strange morning:

the paper was delivered an hour late,

our cat menaced a bag in the corner—

outside the front window, a meter maid

wrote tickets without pausing her scooter,

like Lao Tzu scribbling the Tao Te Ching

on horseback. Even more peculiar:

the furniture was gone—the house empty,

save for a small radio on the floor,

Patsy Cline’s sweet tremolo now drifting

from the living room into the kitchen.

IV. Lover’s Leap

 

A phone is ringing in the upstairs room.

You answer it politely in your mind—

perhaps your future ghost is calling you,

to tell you now to look beneath the blinds,

carefully pull upon the vinyl string

and bare the pages of a tattered will

purposely lodged between the frosted teeth

of a splintered pane and the window sill,

a checklist for the hopeful suicide

to review before some Brechtian leap—

just a cursory glance may well suffice

to nudge you further from the edge of sleep.

Feed the cat. Return your physician’s call.

Make sure you clear the hedges when you fall.

I.

Be as an empty house. Send your guests away

and let the halls go dim. Block out your children.

Lower the blinds. Let the muted gray

settle into the shape your quiet has taken.

Assign each pain its room—unfurnished, plain—

a presence you know by outline alone.

Enter when you must. Leave when you regain

the small composure absence makes its own.

The ascetic is a vessel, narrow and exact,

a conduit pared to what he will endure.

He divines the little he can of the house intact

and lets the unsolved chambers remain obscure.

There is no time for solace or display.

Only the discipline of turning things away.

II.

The romance of leaving. The romance of staying.

Two bodies in the same unlit corridor,

each testing the frame, each quietly weighing

what is kept, what loosens, what presses for more.

You built the inner rooms again—unadorned,

its thresholds cleared, the echoes unbidden.

You crossed it lightly, believing you had mourned

what needed release, your solitude thinned

to something almost bearable. Yet she arrived

without design, and took a room untouched—

a chamber neither grief nor will supplied,

though both had held the others just enough.

Whatever emptiness promised to allay,

she is the one you must never turn away.

There is the image that is removed
from the source: the room unmaking space
around a candle—the light denuded,
a breath withdrawing from its place.
Or the space around that breath—where we
hold our bodies in the mirror’s frame,
repeating some inherited degree
of mother, father—gestures without name.
To be inside and outside the room,
to be inside and outside our bodies—
the light does not distinguish. Assume
the eye returns to where it used to be,
and thought, unlit, divides what we are taught:
two bodies bending toward one thought.

 

The art of the second was born of need:
to sever the head—let it descend
to the retainer’s lap with proper speed
still hitched to the flesh it must transcend,
a newborn’s tether, pale and stubborn, caught
between what leaves and what refuses still.
Mercy and taste: the blade that answers thought,
the practiced hand that sanctifies the skill.
One final stroke to staunch a benediction
or to close the mouth before it speaks in vain—
and spare the watchers any fleck of sin;
the blood directed to a higher plane.
The breath revoked, the body’s work undone—
the tether breaks. There is no resurrection.

 

 

“Delivered under the similitude of a dream, wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country.”

–John Bunyan

I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls

two marks—one holy, one erratic—

an incantation on his office wall,

like the sympathetic magic

of his primordial kin—whose curves

of ochre bison, hunters, horses,

the French so lovingly preserved.

He’ll be half-blind like them, forced

to squint while scribbling in the faintest light

where shadows move like feral beasts—

he’ll press his fingers to his eyes

to prove he actually exists, to cleave

the borders of his prison cell

in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacuui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,

yet proves no less compelling.

How then does man outwit the dark

without putting out his eyes, or sailing

heedlessly toward the burning sun?

Must he lash himself—and his brother—

to a rattling chariot, and run

to death beside him for their mother’s

madness? His choices are more limited

than tracing filament through a maze.

Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive

will cry into that boundless cave,

only to hear voices beyond the room,

echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,

the only light, his thoughts—refracted through

his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—

a film unspooling out of view:

his final moments drawing near;

a flicker caught between this world and that;

a blurred frame for each passing year—

now ending on this faded photograph:

He’d always thought his wife had smiled

a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,

sunning on that imperial virgin isle

by a native decked in costume pearls

strung from his belly to his nose.

He gave her horns—the native, a halo.

 

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. 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.

 

 

 

His embrace may be construed as an act,

his handshake a shill, his smile on the edge

of aggression: a wolf marking his path

will flash his teeth and pat men on the back

to sniff the vapors of his rival’s breath.

His embrace may be construed as an act

of kindness to the novice eye, his tact

a slight of hand to mask the silhouette

of aggression. A wolf marking his path

will scan the party’s aftermath,

the room refracted in his green coupette.

His embrace may be construed as an act

of ownership, circumscribed by a trap

for a passing skirt, which is the secret

of aggression: a wolf marking his path

will circle every option (then fall back

to catalogue the pearls around a neck).

His embrace may be construed as an act

of aggression, a wolf marking his path.

 

 

 

 

 

“I hunted the shadows, disdaining thy true love.”

 –Tom Rakewell

 

There are no wolves, neither shrewd nor recondite,

who would venture to touch her willfully

in the places she left exposed to the light.

It wasn’t a sin, there were no wages— she

hid the wounds beneath her skin, a pale hue

that appeared as dappled sunlight on her face.

Bitter men visit to remember their youth,

in this bed where her body never ages,

preserved in the mirror on the vanity.

The only indiscretion is the silence

in the room, the sheets now gathered at her feet.

You see, she wants to speak. Speak then,

we’re listening, intently as gentlemen

and devils may, all horns and motivation.