On a cocktail
napkin to be recited
in a pub
on Valentine’s Day. Never
drank whiskey when
I still drank. Never
understood romance
when I still believed
it could happen
to me. Never stopped
believing it could
happen to you.
Day Poems
February’s Pedestrian Rant
A smart phone huddle
awakens that skyway
bridge between the bank
and liquor store. Disorientation
comes from peering
at street level. Wine
tasting is on
another night.
“Take a break
from Face
Book to face
the forgotten beauty
of a real book.”
Where did I
read that?
Day 212 (When I Am Home)
I am New England dirt,
the taste of beets out back.
I am not brownstone—
not urban by birth. I am
still in quarry depth,
the scent of cars rusting beneath.
I am not ocher—not red
iron ore impure. I am sipping
fresh water from a claw-foot tub
turned spring, overflowing
to Bone Lake at dusk
and warm. But I am not
the moon to be collected.
I am not forty jokes memorized—
not working a room,
timing accent and plot. I am
ready to mark this laughter
the colors of a flower bed
against brick. I am the line
drawn purple—blues and reds
of a road map
preparing to fold everything
I am
(except magnetic north) in place.
Five Months
Half the Sunday
paper on Saturday.
I would leave the business
section folded, unread
for him. All that caution—
still he preferred
The Wall Street Journal. Grilled
salmon with his secret
marinade sauce
in the years
I ate fish. It always came down
to The Run or The Walk—
capital T, capital R, or
capital T, capital W.
The Asbury Park
boardwalk. Trails
in South Mountain Reservation.
The Delaware
and Raritan
Canal State Park.
The Mississippi
riverfront overlooking
Saint Anthony Falls.
The Kinsale
Old Head before
it became a golf course.
From those Kokomo
rural routes to
a nursing home hallway,
so many other roads, trails,
paths, passageways
to his life. If I could begin
today, how many days,
months, years would it take
to map it all? If I can recall
a path a day, I might
make a little bit of progress
the way he wished.
O, Brother, Where Art Thou?
No one walks
this way
forever. No one waits
for the call
without some skin
crawling in
the dark. No one wishes
this on you—save
perhaps you. Save
yourself from
yourself. I would walk
that far to meet you
in the middle
where odysseys are
just stories we read
before switching off the light.
Water Dancer
for Sheri
She knows every inch of the dock,
every splinter, barnacle,
hurricane seam.
It is not a plank.
It is just where she walks.
And she knows how to dive,
has been doing it for years.
No easing shore side
into the wash for her,
she plunges in and is “used to it”
before others wake.
This is underworld—closets,
caves, roads, the drag
of undertow. This is where she should
live, she who in her heart is a sponge
is a sponge is a sponge.
It is laying out to dry,
the exposure to air,
the rising sun. It is her death
to be before all of you. In performance,
she will never work a room,
works the ocean floor
for all it’s worth.
Leave her uncontained. She would rather
paint kisses—watercolor running—
than be confounded by a mirage of roses
she cannot reach, without a body
protected or unprotected by skin.
Would Have Been
Your 36th
sober birthday if
you had lived. I remember
when you told me
you put down
the bottle. I didn’t understand—
my first tipsy
only weeks before. But
that prayer
I now choke on
between “grant me”
and “the serenity”
since you died. That prayer
I thought you wrote
with your second wife. That prayer
I knew had magic
in it—hanging over
the kitchen sink
ready to help
whoever might read it
come clean. That prayer
I pin
to my heart each night
before I sleep. That prayer
enshrines every gift
you, my father,
ever gave away.
Two Years Smoke Free (Or, David Bowie’s Birthday)
Wild winter wishes
rumble through weeds. A plain
for practicing
freedom cartwheels. Late
afternoon fog, or
are they low-lying
clouds dancing just above
freezing? No more
halo, I make my way home
without rings.
New Day One
The back alley becomes
a graveyard
for worn couches.
Nine degrees
doesn’t feel too bad
if I stay away
from bridges and river
banks. Icicles formed
unnaturally still remain
on bare tree branches
in the yard
where firefighters fought
and lost
a year-end battle. A raging one,
it took down
a 100-year-old multiplex
home with pillars.
How can I leave you behind
in a year so scorched?
Give me a sign
that your spirit has made it
through wind chill to now.
Ode to 2012
More than ready to close
the book
on this year. New cases bought
and assembled. Shelves and volumes
remembered, dusted, rearranged. A new order—but
too much left
unsaid. A beautiful birth, a transformative
death, I stand
somewhere between
living my life.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 