When I look at the moon, I believe in God
in phases. Because he who rapes the body no
longer rapes thought, I said, “no.”
When I look at the moon, I believe in God in pauses
revealed in shadow giving consent to light.
When a new moon gives back
the whole sky, I’ll begin
to believe this body is mine.
I am the scriptio
inferior, I am
the underwriting
of myself. I cannot
wash away the dialogues
I have had with amnesia,
cannot forget
my desire to be seen.
With each alcoholic
palimpsest, I became
powder, irretrievable,
invisible
to myself. With each
reprieve, I am making
a record of what my disease
did not erase.
She will answer her own question
with another question wrapped
inside a brilliantly clean
pattern of reds, blacks, gold—
a pattern bleeding into another,
into another without end. “Will I
make it to the roadhouse
without dying tonight?” Spotting
an unraveling of the veil
of delusion, she picks beautiful silk
threads off the floor
where in desperation she knelt
to ask for help. Another weave in deep
ocean blue overlays the red,
the black, the gold. Indefinite articles
worn loosely over shoulders
could warm Caryatid to release
her boulder, to recover
her posture without a pose.
And so she does make it
to the roadhouse tonight
for a cup of hot black
light roast breathing
free—divine for now.
Lost and found
art lost
and found art is
the moment
I mark
with this pen.
Frogs dart across moist areas of a tended path,
grasshoppers take the dry,
beavers’ work evident by the dead
trees in a still pond—no sign
of the maker, everywhere there.
I step into another woman’s childhood landscape
and can smell my own
in this boathouse on a lake. Fresh
or salt water, it floats. Nothing gets trapped underfoot.
I don’t believe in martyrs,
don’t always believe
my eyes. It’s the primary colors.
They endanger me
with their solid, waiverless
stairs to nowhere better
in black and white. Dirty
snow or marble, maybe
we did meet once before
this day that tips
toward the melt. What if
we were lovers? What
does that make us
now that the boisterous
hues of another summer
have bled away
their urgency? I don’t need
to teach you the difference
between complementary
and complimentary. “How lovely
you look beside me
on this wheel—that cochineal becomes you,
even against his brown,” the yellow says
to the red. I might start
to believe in plastic orange
picks scattered in the street.
And I might pick one up for you
and who you were before.
Either these falls are shrinking
or this river’s high.
Traffic stops
for you when you no longer trust. You’re walking
across blind
spots, a stone embankment and swerve
to tease the dead. You have predicted
you would join those left-handed ghosts
when the right of way
becomes cursed, your body,
upon impact
a weightless parcel
through early spring
air. It’s always an April day
just a half hour before
sunset—civility
in dimming lights dancing off
city streets so many miles before
the skyline disintegrates
into a watery horizon. It’s guess work,
and it’s hard to know when it will crest.
A moving walkway is coming to an end, begin
here where passing through
is an industry. Will I speak
to strangers, you ask no one. I will
not use horizontal escalators
to get what I want, you state
plainly—rural routes
delineate a grid
unlike any you know now.
You remember how you did the leaving,
a wave from the way back window in the red
Chrysler wood-paneled station wagon
as your mother pumped the gas pedal hard
and away. East to Ohio was never enough. Farther still,
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut,
a town in Southern Portugal. An absence
for something, did you ever know, you ask. Some day you will
believe in the pedal steel
player’s sticker on an instrument he plays
that night in Indianapolis:
“Non-judgment day is near.”
A clue
you are digging
your own grave in the dark—
this dirt under your fingernails
exposed.
A dime in the street
becomes two touching
a flatness tires can’t roll
away. Infinity sleeps outside
before summer solstice
in the rain. With morning, it rises
to become a figure eight
on air—hold the ice.
Keep going, dare
ascendance and serifs. By midday,
it just might become
this ampersand above
tree canopies flirting
with young gulls and moths.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 