I surrender my sandcastle to the waves’ kisses
and smile at a couple jogging by. Love cannot be hoarded.
An ocean breeze leafs through my book like a very old woman
licking her fingers before flipping each page.

There is commerce in the ocean:
a frantic swapping of fish and shells and secrets
but no luck for the fisherman who scratches his nose,
throws up his arms, and says to his son: “Nobody’s home”

as boat after boat falls
over the horizon’s harsh plank.

At last year’s prestigious Ho-Lit awards
I won the coveted Layton Medallion
(rhymes with ‘Canadian stallion’), now nestled
in my chest hair as I winter in Crete.

So, mes chères, not that you’re sleeping,
wondering which Doritos Collisions
will collide next, but you are well served –
I thank my editor, Minka, &c.

Hard at work on my mystery novel now:
Murder Most Murdersome, You Murder-Maker.
I’m hoping to wake one day to say, ‘It was
all a dream – those poplar-moon poems!’

The glare of my medallion, however, is real.
Real as the beatings administered behind
the Mont St-Antoine arena. Those beatings
were the worst of your very harsh winters.

Back to a beginning, these walls and I.
Not the first beginning for me,
and surely not for these walls, but we go back.
We know each other’s secrets.
Having seen each other scraped down,
And my father, how he worked,
telling me that they would turn out
better than I could hope, and they have.
Telling me, as we scraped, layer
from layer, paper from paint,
trying to find a smooth surface
on which to apply fresh color, achy, exhausted,
late into the night, me discouraged,
my father encouraging: “They will
turn out beautiful.” They didn’t –
not in the way that beauty is usually defined.
but my father insisted, saying that
he was El Greco, only not a
Greek, and living in Connecticut instead of Spain.
“And,” I pointed out, “other differences
being that El Greco did not use
Benjamin Moore, and that he did not paint
on bathroom walls.”
“That too,” my father admitted, “But I,” he exclaimed
“am the El Greco of the Bathroom.”
And perhaps that night he was,
so long ago, right before
he went mad and took off on what my brother refers to
as his “Gauguin period,” when
he started hanging out at the Polynesian Lounge,
telling strippers that they were wild orchids
of the South Seas
My mother had enough of that soon enough.
And she sailed off, back to Ohio,
Leaving these walls and me,
And our secrets, and our beginnings,
Our nights, our paint.

They pull towards the black
scrawl of shoreline trees

where shapes, movements
become undergrowth
fold into needled darkness.

to six clean officers was spotted $146

either Aberdeen and Edgehill
or Forden an Belmont spotted work
for law by operation was under issued

the at contractors
issued upper lesser and between $267 safety
sunnyside up on a fine individual
1 at ticket generated 6 on tickets

for blowers use to complaints in but for Security
were to Public their August ended least

A cubic meter of salt water contains five hundred million tears
and tears are what you are made of — salt and water and pain and relief

The distance between you and me can be measured in drowned fishermen,
ships lost at sea, shipboard romances, and tidal waves

When you sweat, your frustration comes out in rivulets,
meaning you have many avenues for relieving your stress:
heat and hard work are not your only choices, but they do the job
if you let them

I brought you this glass of water
because I don’t have any comfort to give you
so I comfort myself
with this wet
gift

The fever, with trembling hands,
The fever, following folly and hatred,
Leads me
And rolls me like a boulder down the road.
Calculations all fall and are erased,
The heart leaps up, toward glory or toward crime;
And suddenly I seem to be he
Who is, outside himself, fleeing
Toward the wild call of unanimous forces.

Whether it be rage, or love, or dementia,
Everything passes, in a bolt of lightening, to the bare of all consciousness,
Everything is imagined, before it is felt
The nail of a profound objective driven home in the mind.

Haggard people conjure up torches,
A rumor of sea is devoured, upon porches,
Walls, signs, houses, palaces, stations,
In the demented evenings, before my eyes, terrifying;
In places, posts of gold and light
Lean, toward black skies, lights that exasperate;
A watch-face gleams, the color of blood, upon the fronts of towers;
Where a tribune speaks, at the corner of a junction,
And before we understand what is said,
There is a movement—and it is, with rage,
That we throw to the floor, that we disgrace an emperor,
That we break, that we destroy the pedestal upon which stands the gleaming idol.

The night is colossal and full of noise;
An electric fervor burns through the atmosphere;
Hearts are for the taking; the soul clenches,
In enormous dread, and is freed with cries:
We feel that the same moment is master
In blooming or trampling upon what is to be born.

The people are that which destiny
Will endow enough strong hands
To maneuver lightening and thunder
And reveal, among so many glimmering opposites,
The new star which every new era
Chooses to magnetize universal life.

Oh, don’t you feel how she is lovely and deep
My heart,
This hour
Which cries and beats with the heart of the earth?

That you mean something and the old wise-women
And the dogmatic sunsets upon the sea;
Here is the hour that drives blood and youth
Here is the formidable and marvelous drunkenness
From wine so deranged that nowhere seems ugly.
A vast hope, coming from the unknown, displaces
The ancient equilibrium that wearies the soul,
Nature seems to sculpt
A new face in its eternity;
Everything moves—and one would say the horizons march.
Bridges, towers, arches
Tremble, at the deepest point in the ground,
The multitude and its brusque thrusts
Seem to make the oppressed cities burst,
The hour has chimed in debacles and miracles
And in movements clear and golden,
Over there, far off in the Thabor mountains.[1]

Like a wave in lost rivers,
Like a rubbed out wing, at the end of the expanse,
Swallow
My heart, in its insanities, breaking the capitals
Of their terrors and their triumphant rage;
See how it irritates and exalts
Every clamor, every disturbance, and every fear;
Creates a beam of millions of fibers:
Tightened muscles and nerves that vibrate;
Magnetize and reunite all of these currents—and take
So large a part of these brusque metamorphoses
Of men and objects,
That you feel the obscure and formidable law
Which dominates and oppresses them
Suddenly, in a fit of light, take shape within you.