Philadelphia

Your poems are more serious than mine,
My Bloody Valentine, cocoa and Chianti
tea-leaf cosmos becomes a bedtime trope
sleep like scotch shavings and soulfood
lunch trucks, mac + cheese crust pollens.
everything in the plural, s’s abound, hung
with apostrophes and breasted inside jackets

Follow the river south through plummy trees
over the steam vents pop-tents and Poundian
plaques, into the dive bar with the Frenchman
and the only-in-a-clinic-context man, the one
in the horn-rimmed glasses with the story re:
a tombstone, a list of notable Austrians, or
some Schwitters, tinny on Pine and colonial
pizza: “fümms bö wö tää zää uu, pögiff, kwii ee.”

cream coasters, O Kat, a loveletter to a woman
named Viola who collects envelopes in New Jersey
(cheeserinds for soups and grater cuts on thumbnubs)
this is an economy of hangovers, each like sopping
brows and scotchy pillowcases. Seems So Long Ago,
Nancy, so long since we made pointillist sweet-love
on the vineyard gallery walls, love regions jellyfishing
and brain surgery blues. Snows fall in widgets and never
from the sky, prairies flatten the brain into plates, pips

carboncopied typewriter forensics, purple ink and
quince-fruits: once there was a doctor in love with
an addressee, pockety goods gifted in tortoise stamps
and gum-taste, envelopes as key evidence of desire
and traintravel, probiotics revealed as clever labelling
gut bugs proliferate in raw ewe’s milk cheese, curdled
into architectures, cracked with rust. Being here is
Robert Fripp-y, space between the notes, whistle-whistle