Twenty-first century letter
boxers jump the fence
into a dog park, follow
text messages on the tiniest
chance they might match up
all the clues leading them
to the diamond ring
treasure. I’m back one
and a half centuries
with Emily still writing
“my letter to the World
that never wrote to me.”
The last of the public
pay phones, a dial tone to nowhere
backwards in a dog
park is a hunt
for diamonds, is easier
for some to fathom. Me,
I don’t know how
to wear them, am seeking
other gems.
Free to walk in the rain
in a park—to imagine a dial
tone from the sole remaining
pay phone on the southeast corner
where the sun might have crept in
another afternoon. It might dry up
in time for true blues
on a plaza, for a baseball game
to play out in a new stadium
where birds get in free.
Incidental instrumentation
is a snare drum dance
on a low stage. The frequency gentle
and occasional, the result
a steady and uninhibited linger. Blueprints
to buildings sometimes reveal their windows
upside down, sometimes superimposed
lines pull a stillness over the implied glass.
Merce Cunningham paused on film
in three movements, the music plays
without instrumentation—Cage composed
and decomposing. The lyricism of the moment
collides with an unrecoverable
past. Staggered evidence of feet once buried
in sand, and I’m six and not concerned
with the inevitability
of high tide.
This bleeding is a reminder—
not all watermarks spring
from water, not all spills
are toxic, not all rain washes
away grit, not all words
make it to the next day. She’ll do her best
to read another message
that might hang in suspension
without slipping
out of place. She could become
in place if she refused
to grimace over outpourings.
It is by abandonment
I come to this place
of landing, this state
of delivered from evil
or angels mind. Through clouds,
descent,
the wing behind me, The City
below,
a capitalization
I won’t deny. The loss
of symmetry is
only part of the story.
Months go by, plans
straightened and stacked
against a retaining
wall. One strong June blast
of warm air, and she’s off
her stoop, she’s scrambling
to recollect. The reshuffle
comes out as red as
an improvised sunset
backing off a river.
A cool-down precedes another
runaway from the resurfacing
of every tiny ache and sting
she’s known—by choice
or not. Good
sleeping weather, she hopes
to leave unwelcome
reverberation on her pillow,
hopes to be able to say
what she means to the aerial view
she’ll wave away
as the plane takes her
to a reunion with other scraps
she left behind
by choice. It’s a risk—that word
and its closest relations.
Watching the time drag
itself through the driest
dirt, she wants to kneel
into it and scoop
handfuls into her gaping
mouth, wants to swallow expectations
whole. Then spit them out.
She knows she can’t
have it both ways.
Would she know
balance if
it knocked her off
this pedestrian bridge
she stands on? Closed
for repairs starting tomorrow,
it could be
another unreliable witness.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 