Through galvanized steel diamonds,
we exchange words. I can almost feel
your breath brush off
this skin I wear. As much as I want
that zinc and wire to dissolve
so I can touch your blues harp marred lips,
please don’t sing them to pieces.
I need you
to disappear
into the curve of your unspoken
phrases, so I can continue
to be blown away
with these tree branches breaking against night.
She dreams of exploding
into tiny corkscrews
of stained purple paper
dropping onto a wooden floor.
She wishes she could inspire you
to rage over the mess.
She cannot understand
how you might sweep away
or ignore the color
she believes she might become
if only she could break open
her relationship to trees.
I can see the plume above your head
billows as if you were a mayor
in flammable hair. The river won’t ignite
this time. You’re on your own
with your torch tonguing
its way between stays to the old
wood. What a mouth
you’ve got on you. Mine
pressing against it
won’t save the world, won’t
prevent collapse. Kisses
rarely dampen anything. I’d like
my torch back.
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.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 