SANGUINELLO

Good evening to you
who would have me murdered,
stealing into the place that night
to hold a knife to my neck.

My grief is wintering on
the first blood oranges,
the shagreen sliced diagonal, adrip.
You might have filleted me just so
all those seasons ago.

The afternoon’s awful matinee
yielded some fruit
when the actress said,
“I bet you write love poems
to your abusers.”

Sleep tight, my intruder.
I’m off to eat my fill
of the flesh I have left.

YA NO ES LA ÉPOCA DE COPULACIÓN

Now is not the season of copulation,
Said the guide in the Amazon
Leaving us to work it out in our shared tongue.

Applying the statement to the ants, or the vigilante mosquitoes
Was simple enough, site-specific. We didn’t know animal timing,
Jungle tastes. We trusted the natives to tell us the truth.

But the phrase persists in permutations.
Barren era. Not tonight.

‘TIS THE SPRING MY MURDERED LOVERS

The hunters are dying in the bright halls
Where I am rumored to dance; Conway, Arkansas,

Twitty, Texas. With stage name Doxy,
I called ahead to a hell filled with squirrels.

Guarding the porch with the good eye,
Cutting the same members from the same mags,

The road rises to meet an alley mare, but
With cowboys come werewolves—

Or bad mages harbinger disease, wanna lay me like a sapling,
Feed off some need, all my love so early.

Spike their heads on the kindling.
Mark, no flies in my attic,

They’re all out back with Lazarus,
Digging me out in the snow.
Lighting the frontier on fire.

AUGURY

You learn to read the signs.
Like the country song about getting lucky
with Yoakam in the corner trying to catch your eye
and Lovett just beside you with his hand upon your thigh
and all that grows out of a trip to the bar after a bad horoscope!

And look: Last week the eggs cracked double yolks,
tonight the peppers birthed red alien pods
and on Tuesday night a man whose heart you broke
will watch the meteor shower of the century
at a place called Enchanted Rock.

Plus, the day after the article
on the pending new cloud formation
the sky orchestra so happens to open
the afternoon ensemble
with its ingenue undulatus asperatus!

And how years ago, stepping from the subway,
you’d see a lone glove
on soiled sidewalk: cold-starched, grave,
and it was a matter of blocks
before there she’d be, the one-armed nun
making her way to Our Lady of Pompeii.

It’s written because you wrote it.
One glove is a won glove. But just
as you’re crowing at Orion’s bedazzled belt
slung low across the sky, right
where you dreamed it last night
the oldest man you love has a stroke
on a tour of the nursing home.

Don’t leave out the part where once in traffic
he pointed to the car ahead of you
and told you quietly,
“Watch him turn left now, all of a sudden.”