Seersucker   The seersucker suit turns down a drink. I’ve seen you drinking wine before though, someone says. Chicken and onions, talk of his Soho… receding, recession. It’s a plain dinner we receive, but good all the same.

Kindness I Suppose   These were the days pitched from morning straight into night, the days of vodka 7s in the shower, of you bringing the first good guitar any of us owned over and playing all day long— those broken songs it was, and lives too hard for us to have fully understood. A…

Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’   Lying there. Just knotted and crushed by speckled coils. A whistling snap and bite. I could have sworn I saw him smile. But wrong, that. That was only his last try, a grabbed breath short of shining back to a table’s warmth, the glow of…

Black Water   I spit his name out & four wolves appear. Black, eyes silvery, ears skinned & tense. They thrash their tails twice then rush toward me. A dark pouring. I stagger back, raise my arms. I’d watch him lather his throat. Once a week, for a year. How the oval mirror held him.…

Fresco   Those long-dead painters must have thought it was impossible to remake the world however tender the flowers and birds they left lightly suspended in tempera whose modest visible brushstrokes are like a hand put out to touch the other world they inhabit now or this painted world that they re-enter coming with us…

Late   Not much use saying then I was busy I was asked as if to suggest there were orders I only followed useless afterwards when you find it was your life you murdered your own life that mobile muscled thing so sweet to hold but always slipping out of your arms grasping and letting…