Life shucks life --

Unravel, dispel,

expose.           

Girls molt

and spit baroque

pearls, waterlogged

and furious for

beauty. You can smell

the ocean on them. 

Meet Me Here August Thirtieth, Two-Thousand Eight

I leave too early one day and find
    myself leaking--
elevators alleviated of slave cables
             --a dropping sensation
               as memory mentions you.

I get a feeling that you have noticed
          that matted spider
making a dangling fist of itself.

I get a feeling you have let it hang there
               from the light in your shower
                        for weeks,
noosed politely by its own web.

It is early morning.
Clouds of tree dander smack silently on the windshield.

I hear your fierce face soften with sleep

Carrion Flower

In Assateague, I walk beneath a mobile of grey and white herons
and spend an afternoon prying open the mouth of your ghost.

In my haste, I force a beard on your adolescent face; memory is this way.
It is as though I am bored by the broken movie of you, silenced.

Before you died, there was no brazen arena, no altar
to pile memory and scent and hallucination into one unflinching column.

              Your body pressed into the socket of the ground
              and my entire life became a matter of mortar.

Before you died, I was loud and obscene.

              Then I grew parapets for ears, felt each sound to be a stoveburn. 
              I embarked on a beguiling quiet, as one who is silenced by the slap at childbirth.

Footsoles now are streaked with light.
                      Aurora squalls out of wrist and skidmark.

I visit you, coiled noiselessly in memory’s reel-to-reel.
Clay busies the corners of your shut-eyes in nauseous compliance with tradition.

To my memory’s indigence, I bring the diesel of your bully yell.
I press my longing beneath the nose of your stilled body like smelling salts.
I wed the feeling of weeping to the most mundane sprig of remembrance.

I see at once several thousand pearls, shit out by gulls and plovers,
mangled by the appetites of algae and gravity.

They lodge into an ocean floor,
maritime molars, nacreous
and moonlike, lost without a lightsource. 

Ocean, brackish glacial throat, approaches scandal as flame-swallower. 
Each day that you spend fashioning your body to groundwater,
I count these dim-lit nacres, tired wet galaxies.

Like sweat, the mute expressions of pain: they translate as radiance.

Quitting

It is the first hot day of summer. A couple walks on opposite sidewalks from one another. They walk briskly and speak over the width of the street.

                        FAT MAN BALD MAROON T-SHIRT

What, you wanta go to a movie or sumpin’?

                        SAG WOMAN PONYTAIL PALE PINK T-SHIRT

I wish my father was still alive.

                        A long pause, then,

FAT MAN BALD MAROON T-SHIRT

I luv you.