Always a bit of gravel
or tar stuck to the bottom
of my shoe. Seldom
anyone watching
when I knock it off.
Haven’t studied a piece
of sculpture in over a month.
Longer for a painting
on a wall or dance performance
on some specific site.
I’m using
pretzel formation
to collect images
to keep from losing
my mind—you are gone.
How long do I wallow
in your death?
It was so long ago,
your kisses tasted
like smoke, not mine.
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.
You didn’t even meet the life
expectancy of a galvanized
gabion. Nothing quarried
could ever fill you.
In the end, I wouldn’t have satisfied
that thirst for the irretrievable—
youth, unpredictable distortions
of a scrambled mind. It was you
who thought I wasn’t ready
to be so contained. Through mesh
and shadows, I see now
where I might have been
able to tuck myself in.
As your front line eroded,
someone else gained an edge.
Only a brisk swim at dawn
could return the equilibrium
your grandparents hoped you’d find.
Just one more question, then I promise
to let you rest in peace:
What did you do with the green
house once you sold off
those last blooms and colors
after your private war had ended?
I like to imagine you may drift
across its threshold
on particularly windy mornings.
Engine shut off,
brakes released.
We rolled the teardrop window car
down the driveway
like spies.
Curfew or no curfew,
we discovered our own
way to decode the night.
What if it was a mistake? You
were to call me and yell into your town’s last land
line, “I’m not dead dear. Stop
spreading those rumors.” Cremated
or buried—cremated and buried. Bridges
open avenues to nonchalance. Back
to the world, a quick flick of the left wrist
and release. Undo that—can’t be done.
Coincidence? In the hours before you died,
my cat trapped a bat in the claw
foot tub. Played with it almost
to death. When I called a trusted friend to rescue it/
me, we both naively hoped
it might fly into the midnight sky—broken
wing and all. And the hope that I might see you
glide through this life one more time was dashed
against unforgiving pavement in that moment—the one
I wouldn’t know I would desire
to retrieve for years.
If I die tonight, will we
become lovers by tomorrow
evening? Civil twilight to entwine
two severed spirits. Counting
finally done. To drink or not, new
wine or old—it won’t matter. That age gap
sewn up once and for all. If
I make it till morning, I will continue
to keep a record
of what might have been.
No more the Police’s “Don’t Stand
So Close to Me.” This AA Bondy song, “Mercy
Wheel,” will be our new
our song. Your obituary
says to donate to the American
Heart Association in lieu of flowers—but
you loved them.
Is it because you died
of a broken heart?
Is the reference to the American
Lung Association because the loss
left you unable to breathe?
Past lovers are just that—
in the past. To make love
in a Victorian novel does not require
removing clothes. Consummation
and closure are two different things
you forgot to explain—and now you’re gone.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 