In the throes
of my intention
disorder, I forget
your name, how to reach
the top of you, how to
let go of those limbs
you wave over me.
In these fits, the stories
I tell are not mine
except when they are.
That I come from ash,
that my mother left me
in the rain
without a skeleton
shelter, that I still
eat dirt (raw not baked)—
these are some of the ones
I intend to qualify
when I no longer suffer
from disease over the way
jacks wish to cut you down.
Graffiti isn’t graffiti
unless she calls it.
On an old water tower crowning
an abandoned grain mill—
perhaps. “Erin I love you” attaching
itself to the “and then it got
very cool” end
of Ashbery’s poem on a pedestrian
bridge—definitely.
These messages
you leave
for her in waterfall rushing
to flow into southern lines—
she thinks they won’t disappear too soon.
He finds her one
piece at a time
along railroad tracks, in riverbeds, beneath
piers, over gutters. It takes
months to find her mouth,
but the hands appear
without effort. His search begins
when he’s walking
along the shoulder
of a dusty road
outside a town he has considered home. Not
so much anymore. A patch
of sapphire light
in the distance drags him
into the brush—a freight
line that time forgot. Wild flowers
he knows someone would call weeds,
except for that color. It draws him in. There, surrounded
by ties and a broken empty Wild
Turkey bottle caught in the dirt, two imperfectly round
stones the color of an angry ocean
before the eye
of a storm. They become
the start, his decision
to invent a woman
from what he can’t know.
In the gathering,
he is not literal—no black
tupelo twigs for limbs, no
algae strands for hair. No,
he collects what he collects
because she is guiding him
to make her whole, complex
enough to hold his attention
for longer than the discovery
of each piece. There is only one
rule he follows:
he must be walking.
When I visit
my sister
next month, I will
think of you
still pretending
your banana
seat bicycle
with string-ray
handle bars
is a horse.
Everyone is (a) pedestrian.
This corridor is mine
to crawl through to touch
the classless dream(.)
Sandusky is not merely amusement, not merely
a beer garden, bathhouse, dance
floor where the first lover
would begin to break
my hope over cold water. Edging Lake Erie,
a peninsula not an island
after all, Ohio’s tendency for hills. I stay away
to prevent roller coaster motion
sickness—we’re never cured
from the disease
of memory. What we get
if we’re very lucky, and the light
is with us, is
a daily reprieve from our inner ear’s relentless imbalance.
She believes she can stand tall against shadow,
affect the light
into afternoon, identify the stone
figure staring at her as she turns a corner
to enter
another establishment
old as sin. It could be
hers—wrapped into the dirty
canopy fabric above the narrow door.
* The title comes from the Preface to Luc Sante’s Low Life.
On a grayscale
from blizzard to moonless
night, she rates you scattered
clouds and the smiling bright
new 35W Bridge.
I swore I would never do this, but here I am trying to start a blog using my little day poems. Here’s one from a couple of months ago.
Plectra
(Day 2,322)
Everything vibrates
whether we admit it
or not. The piano
is a percussive instrument
I could not play
very well—the harpsichord
is plucked like a child
from a secure sleep
into male and female
shouts going to different lengths
and depths to be
heard. No one was listening. A rock
glass smashing against a wooden step,
a china vase shattering
against a windshield, impervious
to the drama. When all motion stops,
and the permanent split is identified
and legally documented,
vibrations carry on elsewhere.
I only played the baroque instrument
once—I was that child.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 