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”