Tu mi parli della tua vita e dell’angelo che ha lasciato in te il profumo della presenza...

Tell me of your life, and of the angel you left in the perfume of your presence...


To wake up on a hill, is what you’re missing. With lightly bent branches and eased foot steps leading to where we fell asleep. Somewhere high and quiet. It’s not the rush we’re looking for, but the suspension. Height making magnitude, and magnitude, stillness. So we slip down and swell up.

(what you’re missing, to be diminished)

A shell, where we were walking, and I picked it up, the circlet rubble. I found it, to bind it around your neck. Singing Beach, because of the moaning peel of a foot’s arch departing sand, because of the heaving.

You know why were there. Clamming up cigar ends with wet shorelines because goddammit, we could finally buy them. After driving thousands of miles, east and away, you know why we were there. Something like crumbs, insurgence, and poetry. Poetic insurgence. Crummy poetry. You knew.


Shoes off, Maine, nobody but us, e.e. cummings in the car, the faint, spoiled smell of the Starbucks I spilled, the rosary I bought you hanging from the mirror. An acorn from Walden’s pond (for the Aristotle in Alec), lemonade on the dock, the soft hegemony of heat and horizon, all our verges. You rolled up the ends of your jeans and went wading. It’s the Prufrock in you.



You’re speaking.
I hear the clinking of her angels in a shoebox. Angels, and baskets.
–Disowned, passed on?—
Beneath the J-Crew and button down you are pushing lilacs through concentration camps. That’s what life smells like, you once said, and I would add only brine.

You’re smoking. The gray diminishes you. I think you like it this way.
You and I talk God for a while, convening ash and water. You and I talk God, for a while.


“Shit fuck damn.” Your favorite. It’s the Caulfield in you. Except, you say it "shitfuckdamn" slurred so close together it sounds lyric.


Before we found scotch, we found city. Chicago in the rain, lit in the middle, wandering one-year-old adults through the humdrum and prowl. Boston. Cannoli in the Common, frosted sticks and Quincy’s market. New York. Train tokens slipped by pity and accident into the trembling paper of a beggar woman’s cup.

We climbed a tree at Niagra Falls, bewildering the Indian tourists. Singing Rufus. Dangling flip-flops.


You said to me, “I miss her.”
I said to you, “I forgive him.”
You said, “into the strenuous briefness.”
I said, “there are no alms involved.”
You, “if grace exists, it is the most beautiful thing in the world.”
I, “carry my heart with me, I carry it in my heart.”

And, “such a small
space you take
up on that chair, the wave of
your body ,so,
small, fills

the whole
hollow in me) some
times

two cubic feet
of you curtails my vast, empty universe”

Here is the moon over bay
the high whistling of a stranger
who must know you
to move that hungering through his teeth

here is a very slow dancing
soft light, the underground conversion
to the cataclysmic view

quickened moving steeple shadows
wristwatch, dropped down a grate

Here is the screen
the credits are rolling
it means we're transparent
we've nearly caught up
and the music score is drifting upstairs

Let me wake up take me with you
harmonies coursed through telephone lines
the white gaps on an apple where you
kissed too hard