Entangled in a net of no one
to blame’s making, I forget
what I said yesterday
about this pier and its hurricane
scars. About to begin
another plunge into dense
deconstructions
of choppy water. About to listen
for those dirges we prepared, buried
in this sand before I began
to follow musicians around with this
spill—I don’t forget theirs,
they come ashore with ease.
Crouched above
you, she holds
everything against
the mantle and flicks
lit matches,
narrowly escaping
your exposed
proud flesh. I could be
her before another
renovation after rain.
Each time I break
this silence to join
a conversation, I have to start
at the beginning
again to learn
what I’ve missed since the last
time I was human.
That was when they had the invisible
fence. That was when you said
I had a warm heart. All of you
got it wrong.
No position to be in, vertebrate
lips stick together standing
up. Does the female possess
the male, or does he just swim
upside down? That damned secretion is used
for balance. Incapable of flight—
two hundred eggs still
to be transferred. If only
propulsion ended here.
(found poem from Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, edited by Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall with Brigitte Berg)
To be
multimodal
in two years is to be
a ride down can’t get there from here
derailed.
Another bundle up surprise
to dodge the moaning
bulk of one sanitation
truck in fall snow sputter
and mount is too soon, is to
become extinct not soon enough.
All the beautiful
moments have been taken.
What’s left
in my releasing
hands is this—
truthful seep into the less
elastic skin of memory.
Song crosses a bridge
wood-cut, film is
cabin built and framed
inside a postage stamp
she would be afraid to use
unless she were to write
you a letter for
wallpapering another dead
letter office. We all live
there at some point
on the span we cross,
oblivious and blinded by the crashing
irony of an ocean
called peace.
She never takes room—a spillover
lover from his last book
of bed times
and sleeping porches
in a town so much
warmer than here. Where
he would say fuck out
loud, she would be a collapsed
chorus of giggles:
Who is this
who makes me fall
down so easily into
spasms without withdrawal,
not even from a drop
of espresso
that woman splattered
on her way out the door? But
he sings it instead, and that
just makes her stand steady for more.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 