With that simple placement
of a single red
rose in your tended
gravesite flowerbed
I say good-bye. Still I see
your face, hear your voice
in strangers conversing
as they do their jobs
in your hometown. Whoever reads
the message I attached to the thorn
will know the code
to break your inappropriate hold
on my life. Some symbols
need to die.
She tucks a note
into the flower bed beside
his tombstone to start
an anonymous conversation
with all the other cemetery
saviors who may hit this graveyard
before leaves camouflage
the beginning and end
dates engraved in stone
and mute everything in between.
A bed of pine needles
because it’s Massachusetts.
You wear a shirt studded
with diamond-shaped snaps
two nights in a row. I’ll never tell
you how I like the gray
in your beard
the way I told him never
to shave his off
30 years ago. I won’t mix
you up. The music is
immortal. The flowers he grew
were something else.
So this is the setting
of those high school days I made
you long for. This is you
at the age I was
when we met. So that was your secret
ambition. That’s your smile
before the war
bent it out of shape. So this is me
trying to make sense of the ultimate
why
our paths crossed in the exact
tangled deformation
they did.
Graffiti artists or civil
engineers leave
their mark on a sidewalk
outside an abandoned gas station. A half empty
bottle of Coors, one soaked pack
of Camels beside
your tombstone—vandals or care
takers. The golden
section, topology, a field
trip to the MIT Computation Center. Figures
may not lie, but street addresses can
disappear. What’s left is
open to interpretation.
Let’s agree to disagree
about this anger
I don’t feel. Only
those numbers in your handwriting
erased from a chalkboard
30 years ago know
how we were supposed to add up
or not. A psychology
of emotions cannot qualify
the spirit in the slate,
a song over the dugout,
stanzas hidden in the threshold
we passed through
so many times
without thinking to pause
long enough to honor the reveal.
Let this table not wobble, my coffee
not spill. Let me not offend
an old friend, remember how
to pronounce the name of your hometown
before I get there. Let it not rain
in New York City
Friday night. Let me discover alternative
spellings for closure, stop trying
to recall how you greeted and bid me
farewell—how I loved it so much
I kept it a secret
even from myself. Let me learn
how to write a grant to pay
for all this incurable longing
neither of us could afford.
She tells me to locate
my anger—to let it spill
onto your grave. Lost. No belief
in the deconstruction
myth plotting out how
you hurt me. Did you? Did I
you? Were you merely a tragic hero
I fabricated to escape
the curse
of the Take No Heroes Hotel?
No matter what she says, I may just collapse
on the cold stone
and pretend to be a peony
fluttering in strange October air.
No perforation in a bird safe
building. I will smash
against glass if
I’m too absorbed in calculated
thought to see what barricades me
from you. It’s a long way
from our footprints
in the sand.
Superstition and grooming
don’t mix in graveyards.
Urn selection can be a fun activity
for two—no more. Decisions
made during grief
break over our heads
as lightning on a warm October night.
A thunderous silence
leaves me counting
to digits even you
hadn’t planned to touch.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 