Crag  

I keep seeing her:
amber dress, madame-butterflylike,
Un bel di vedremo underbreath,
poised over the edge. At the last

second, she pulls back.

The sky is ashen,
nondescript as yesterday's paper.
This is the obituary that recopies
itself on every page, this is

where seagulls splatter

the stylus, the aria,

the scars on the vinyl record.

The Psychoanalysis of Pain

Father eased clients daily into his office,
perfume impregnated his black leather couch.

He videotaped confessions, prescribed shock
treatments, created Botero women with cortisone.

At home he withheld love like a hanky snatched

away at the last instant. He enjoyed the flowering

of distress on faces, lured wasps to their deaths

with my body heat. I learned to bite down screams,

cut short his pleasure with arid eyes. My mother played
the saxophone, for years her fingers fumbled notes

in the bathroom. He never failed to remind her
she lacked soul, tried to hook her on barbiturates.

Eventually she left with a blues singer. Do victims fall
in love with their killers? In the end, she came back

to nurse him, keep his nails clean. Once I saw her

throw boiling tea at his face, hush away his pain.

Figure Study in Gray  

And, of course,
the first thing they said was
the body knows
what needs to be done
as if it's all about changing
the novocaine dose,
looking at skylark figures

to forecast snow.

And the body skated for its life,
skated further
towards that triple twist,
triple twisted further
towards that fall,
fell further
down the scoreboard.

And what was
the classification of the knee
that cracked on ice?
The body spiralled into pain,

which was nimbus gray --

a toe pick between
the slipped disc

and half-hearted applause.

Nigel Loves Michi

He carves this

on the oak, three blocks

from where she lives.

This time, he says,
he's sure of it. I'm thirteen,
he's thirteen.

She's the candy-shop girl --

all Yerkes Observatory

and sawdust freckles.

He calls it love.

I know for a fact

she short-changes him.

Arthur  

He was in the monocle business.
Until the late 60's,
it seemed the better part of his life,

like the word traipse

on a leg cast.

And so it goes --
he realized
there was a stain in his right lung
(upper-left corner);
he realized the voluminous
quality of storm clouds,

Sunday girls

on commercial diapers.

Does overweeping make the broth?

He liked to coddle

forceps under the table.

He kept his wires in a paperbag.

He was rigorous

about essays on the bonobos,

mentioning sex twice
every three thousand words.

For years, kirsch chilled

in the freezer. Eventually, Arthur died.

We opened the bottle

and discovered

all the funny pictures.