The more she intends
to appear, the less
likely she will. Her
disorder does not translate
well. This is not commentary, this is
fear. She tricks herself into
showing up for the next
inhale, then the exhale will
follow, no questions asked. Except
one. An aside.
The back burner’s blue
flame in this dark is too blue
to become my personal amethyst—
too close to scorched red metal
not to be.
She dreams of exploding
into tiny corkscrews
of stained purple paper
dropping onto a wooden floor.
She wishes she could inspire you
to rage over the mess.
She cannot understand
how you might sweep away
or ignore the color
she believes she might become
if only she could break open
her relationship to trees.
Suffering gratitude is a burden
she will carry from the well
to the fire in a vessel
upon her shoulders—
understanding spilling
like new wine speaking
in tongues to the warmed earth.
She endures the gift exchange
of her clan, a ruby-colored cloth
passed between women till one declares
it will be torn
into a deck of cards
made of erotic fiber.
Small swatches for young men
to pick from, each choosing
randomly until one last piece
is left for the one who has waited
to learn love
with the woman who witnesses
an exquisite act of destruction
in every gift there is.
In English. The sea is a false promise
of return,
ebb and flow,
rhythmic come and go,
the Portuguese fisherman’s saudade,
the Korean cane cutter’s han,
the American salesman building a heartland,
longing for salt and brine
he has never known.
I am the outlier
toward a route,
I am the proclivity
toward disbanding communes.
I am the lock
picked and forgotten
on the storm door,
I am longing itself
plucked and mounted
on the den wall.
I am
without heteronyms,
without Whitman,
Pessoa,
I am this plain,
unbannered song
of go-low yearning
caught inside the frame
of a habitat gone wrong.
I am fallen
winged fruit
through quilled foliage
surrounding the roots
of our tough elastic wood
into another millennium,
a clique fallen
loud and brash
without an echo.
I can see the plume above your head
billows as if you were a mayor
in flammable hair. The river won’t ignite
this time. You’re on your own
with your torch tonguing
its way between stays to the old
wood. What a mouth
you’ve got on you. Mine
pressing against it
won’t save the world, won’t
prevent collapse. Kisses
rarely dampen anything. I’d like
my torch back.
In the throes
of my intention
disorder, I forget
your name, how to reach
the top of you, how to
let go of those limbs
you wave over me.
In these fits, the stories
I tell are not mine
except when they are.
That I come from ash,
that my mother left me
in the rain
without a skeleton
shelter, that I still
eat dirt (raw not baked)—
these are some of the ones
I intend to qualify
when I no longer suffer
from disease over the way
jacks wish to cut you down.
That she could define the sacred place inside her architecture of breathing,
that she could steal her father’s Old Head cave—naturally programmed with thick
Irish grass to cushion vistas of the Irish Sea—
that she could claim even one piece of rock as her own
to build a chapel for her own non-conformity,
would be her attention to structure,
would be her proposal to the world,
would be her physical presence
inside a hallowed ground where there are
no lines, no dimensions, only
the exquisite knowing of a spot
where she, like seamen before her,
would go. She would go
to rest her body, to forget it, to uncover
in the rubble of Earth’s design,
souls lost, souls renewed,
a storm pushing so many
waves into the cave, etching
its remarkably evolved design
no human hand could replicate.
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
drying 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.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 