Slowly as a feather
drifting in luxury
down till it dropped
suddenly—a splat
of cobalt blue
inking the background
in all directions. That plane
taking off
from O’Hare
a week ago
really wasn’t gaining
altitude fast
enough, and I believed
for a moment
that my desire
to see you one more
time would kill
me for real. No near
miss. And then suddenly
it began
to climb,
and I realized
I would make it
back to Minnesota. Anywhere
you hang yourself
and survive
to tell the tale
is home.
The last day
of summer gets forgotten—
rafts and dinghies
already stored
in garage rafters
for winter. Some kids
starting their second
month of school. Some years
the leaves are already
turning—not this one.
Grieving the end
of nectarines and plums
over for weeks now. Memories
of swimming
in an ocean or lake or river or creek
in the heat fading
with a full harvest moon
that rose
three nights ago.
She missed it again—but not
the double rainbow that appeared
before a steady mist
accompanied yesterday’s civil
twilight. She won’t forget that.
When he makes
love, he talks—he adores
those vocal chords. But
then subtitles
for the hearing
impaired could be a series
of grunts and snarls, doors
slamming shut—the official
language of last
century’s troubadour. And
those bites were as real
as the slap
in his face—all
while we held each
other’s hearts on mute.
You are my laughing phoenix,
I am yours.
Our cackling woke the dead.
Endlessly we cracked jokes
waiting for the fire engines (not red)
to arrive.
No, wait! Hurry! Get back
inside. Let the smoke
choke us out of five hundred years’
worth of played-out puns.
Six hundred too many Arabian nights
have us cracked up under the moon.
Reduced to ashes, we could ask to be blood-red,
winged beauties next to one another
shaking feathers forever in the desert.
But you would not reinvent yourself
with me. For me,
the ashes scatter irreverently. For you,
tradition’s fire in the belly burns
as you wait for ladders and hoses.
Dry as the skin of wakened dead,
the puns will reduce me
to tears for five hundred or so
more years. Unless, of course,
you weren’t my last,
laughing one.
To hang sconces
so low they could poke
an eye out. To climb
a ladder left
to rot beside
a dead pigeon still
in perfect form. To bruise
the right
wrist when the left
ankle is already packed
in ice. To be so
vulnerable is no more
bad luck than
cracking up in full
length mirrors.
Strike twice on
the same stage
in the same
heart to doom
the same
life all over
again. She only thinks
she recognizes
that dose
of thunder
as his.
Where does the pain go
when she stops
feeling it? When
it is no longer
masked by
drugs or delusion. When
the physical becomes
emotional becomes
psychological dares
to become
spiritual. Couldn’t it
just be?
Pain is
a messenger
she would like
to shoot
if she had
a gun. If
she believed
in that sort
of thing. If
she had
better aim. If
she wasn’t
sometimes in
love with it—him.
The trigger
point may be
centimeters (or miles)
lower than he thinks. It may
be so much
higher, so much
in your head.
She threw
nostalgia in—
along with your initials.
“Turn all
post-war, pre-washed, personal works
over for good, or
for as long as it takes
to forget
again.”
Another message
written in poor
handwriting, stuffed
in a glass
bottle to be tossed
into another body
of water—salt or fresh,
or in between.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 