Colors this summer Raritan
carries: of this flailing, flaring New
Jersey sunset of the burnt-ends of cigarettes
as they and gravity then the river kiss
Red’s surge toward night-
fall: a dark diastole rich with the blood
of pigeons, worms, catfish—a mercury blood,
heavy with gas This orange Raritan
This drunk, Dutch princess flanked as if by knights:
trunks bent, leadened with her forgotten things they knew
tomorrow would bring nothing but kisses
of moss feasts of cigarettes
and pistols, denim and pulp All sick at rest
with silt in the roots, their shallowed blood,
bruised corpuscles kiss
only the light left, only the ache for some life rarer than
this, apart from the current’s slurs and weights New
moon—pulsing yellow muscle of the night-
to-be—flexes along each surface: driftwood night-
stands, a kingdom of algae, ash-nests of cigarettes—
even the vertebrae of gulls aglow as henna-brown canoe
hulls, course past blood-
oranges, pockets of glass, a Samaritan
mold And as the bitter, mosquito kiss
of evening ebbs in, its shifts and shadows kiss
every branch, every veined leaf and weed: night-
shade, poison oak, sumac root orangutan
vines of ivy along the banks awash in cigarette
fog, ripe with tar And now as how blood
clots to black, the river thickens tints: its platelets of news-
paper ink shake-songs of newt
throats and cricket shanks kissing
the growing murk Here freon blood’s
systolic pump through fridge coils, these night-
sticks beached among trestles, cigarettes’
leach and slush: all lullaby the muck This Raritan—
this hematite sinew moth-swollen nightingale
ventricle kissed with charcoals, cigarette
papers—its blood-dyed roar, return