And then finally the rain
comes to crash night into its lover
lighting to pronounce a distant crack
of ecstasy. I won’t go
to the window. I know. Tomorrow
morning the world
will smell of lilacs and the memory
of wet concrete
and bark. And into it
I will walk around a corner
ready to give desire
another chance.
She’s going to write another
poem about how she almost
moved
to Georgia. And she’ll use
move
at least two more times
before finding relief
for a blistered left
thumb. This burn—an accident.
An embarrassment.
An encounter
with a flat
iron nothing like the wedge
of a building where her former
self began.
Then the move
back
to Connecticut, then the big one
to Minneapolis—not Athens.
One music town
or another
moves
ahead. A northern girl
in the end—so far.
“Lap and drag. Crag and gleam.
That continual work of wave
And tide, like a wet wind, blowing
The earth down to nothing.”
—Tracy K. Smith, from “Minister of Saudade” (in Duende)
When laws of motion become lairs,
it’s time to reconsider the quarry
and what it might hold. She stopped
buying bathing suits when she learned
the truth about limits. Love
lies at the bottom
of the bottomless. There she’ll be—
denying her need
for oxygen. Not a little death.
Not a death at all.
When emails
become too transparent, coffee
bars too communal, the cathedral
steps too shallow,
she’ll stop
this conversation
to honor stray rooftops.
The flight across pre-spring
parkland on a hot March
morning, or the sinking
to the bottom
of the Atlantic. Pinging
back and forth between
ocean and river, bicycle
wheel and open
window won’t revive
verbs that prefer
to remain dead.
Packed into a cardboard box
with ly’s dangling
from gaps between
the flaps. I’m done with action
that can’t justify
itself. If an escalator squeaks,
let it squeak. If a cat scratches,
let it. If the box
gets returned to sender
because exile has no zipcode,
let it sit on the stoop
till I’m ready
to unpack it—slowly
cutting off those letters first.
A basketball left
on a playground half
covered in snow—the view
through the chain
link fence. A typo
in a blog entry posted late
at night—the view
through cleared morning
vision. A mannequin wears
a flowing dress with white
lilies over a background
the color of the inside
of a grapefruit—the view
across an empty plaza. The lipstick
I leave on
this ceramic coffee mug
is the only view
I can touch.
No chance for nighttime
dreaming—a neighbor’s dance
beat disruptions wreck
any hope
of true REM. Her tolerance
for talking to drunks
has diminished
over a decade in reprieve
till it’s shrunk
to the size of a single shot
of espresso
she’s going to sip
in the morning start-over.
There’s a story behind
Staten Island Ferry
orange. I can’t tell
it but can hear its tone
revealed in a soothing voice-
over through early morning fog.
Routine commuting becomes heightened
by the transcendent
moments before
the marathon begins
on the Verrazano
Narrows Bridge. By a skyline
permanently scarred, by a keel
built with steel
from collapsed towers, by film
and TV footage of our favorite
characters crossing one way
or the other. Sometimes someone
who’s had too much
winds up where he started
without getting closer
to home. Color
declares, or hides, or widens
the channel for multiple
interpretations. Always the same
orange, always the same
distance either way.
An open safety pin
lies on a sidewalk
sprinkled with snow
as the temperature
plummets. She second
guesses her choice
to leave it there. Questions
the optimism she offered
a stranger last week. A weapon
is a weapon. Drunk
driving is driving
drunk, underage or
over it. If she had
a license, it would have caught
up with her
by now. A sigh
and accelerated pace,
pedestrian reprieves
count just as much.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 