Only you could get away
with that haircut—you
really didn’t. If I met your brother
in a hallway or on a baseball field
would I see your face, hear your deeply accented
laugh, touch that beard
you shaved off
too soon? Would he know
why this stranger observes
his every move? I continue
to risk being
misunderstood for one of those
moments we used to share before
gravity and all other laws overtook us.
I still live
in a coin operated
world. These social networking
tricks do not align
with how I shrink
from true human
contact when the moon begins
to count. If he kept the letters
I wrote, where would they be
now? Hearts bought
at estate sales
are non-refundable.
What was once a blush
you so eagerly sought
to induce has become
a flush
into my middle
age. The gap has been shrinking
steadily for nine years. I hope to catch
you in another nine. Grief—nothing
embarrassing about it.
It revolved around Boston,
the Cape, Amherst, the Vineyard, Woburn,
an entire state—
our common ground. You—
with your accent and clearly delineated roots. Me—
with a brief history,
my mother’s story, and an incurable longing
no word in English
could contain. All of our plotting
and heightened talk went nowhere beyond
imagination. Now that I know
you are back home, I’ll fly
East so we can finally spend a moment
together on this sacred turf. You—
ashes. Me—alive
more than ever, ready to be enough
for the both of us.
Force of habit that I keep talking
to him even if he has not responded
in more than a quarter century. Dead
for nearly a decade. Sorry
for this latest obsession
and the way I write around it
in circles, never piercing
the heart so I can move on.
This isn’t an amends. I see no curve
in the road, no opportunity to make a U-turn. No desire. No plea
for forgiveness. A status update—
nothing more.
For non-drivers a dead man’s
curve exposes an inner belt
deep within. Just as suddenly,
just as lethal, just as exhilarating
for the survivor. But I
don’t know if I should accelerate
around this grief.
I collect dates
as if they were door
handles. Seek the perfectly shaped one
to build a saudade
life around. Your birth, or death,
or the afternoon you got divorced—
it could be one of those.
But I choose to lock
my eyes on a calendar
with the first day of school
circled in red. Tuesday,
September 2nd, 1980. You looked right
in red. Let the vintage ink
smear. Now I will too.
Yes, I do this thing to live
life twice.
To get a second chance
to say
the right thing, glance
at you
from the right angle,
take charge
when you hesitate,
lean back
in silence when it’s your turn.
I’ll learn to accept all these
little deaths
when you show me how in the next
revision.
Mixed in with a bundle of continuing education
junk mail, she pulls out a letter
originally postmarked August 17, 1981. No explanation
for how it made its snail
of all snails way to her current mail box
given how many addresses and lives
she has slipped through in 30 years. This is a poem,
not a documentary on the US Postal Service. She doesn’t
recognize the return address—all but rubbed out
from decades of dodging the dead
letter office. She hesitates to open it
for fear it will crumble in her fingers—sender
identity lost in a palm
full of stationery dust. Swallowing hard, she tears
from the top. Is jarred
by the careful construction
of each letter to each word. Such elegance
from a male hand. She instantly recognizes
the handwriting. It’s from you.
A brief missive. Spending a week on the Cape
with relatives before returning
to another school year of pushing numbers
to students the way someone else might sell the alphabet—
C&M, H, LSD, MJ, PCP. It ends:
My dear, my heart is breaking
as I realize you are gone
forever. Next time we meet, you will no longer be
a teenage girl dolled up in blushes
and high heels. Were they for me? You will be
an adult—I will be too intimidated to touch
even a strand of your hair. Next time
we meet, you won’t remember how
I say your name. My dear, this is life. Trust me
when I say it’s for the best.
All that we mourn today becomes enriched sod
we use tomorrow to keep growing. Or we perish.
Carefully folding and tucking the letter away, she wonders
how she got so lucky to receive mail from the dead.
Not ready—not ready
for what? Sexy architecture
exposed to the naked
and untrained. To mourn
another death I missed
during my two-year
blackout. To check into a library
hotel. Talk to the dead
for ten days straight
about a dress I might wear. Remember
my dreams again. Or, it is this:
I have put everything down—the bottle,
smokes, the pen I’ve used
to write letters of desperation. It is that
I’m just not ready to go.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 