Graffiti isn’t graffiti
unless she calls it.
On an old water tower crowning
an abandoned grain mill—
perhaps. “Erin I love you” attaching
itself to the “and then it got
very cool” end
of Ashbery’s poem on a pedestrian
bridge—definitely.
These messages
you leave
for her in waterfall rushing
to flow into southern lines—
she thinks they won’t disappear too soon.
He finds her one
piece at a time
along railroad tracks, in riverbeds, beneath
piers, over gutters. It takes
months to find her mouth,
but the hands appear
without effort. His search begins
when he’s walking
along the shoulder
of a dusty road
outside a town he has considered home. Not
so much anymore. A patch
of sapphire light
in the distance drags him
into the brush—a freight
line that time forgot. Wild flowers
he knows someone would call weeds,
except for that color. It draws him in. There, surrounded
by ties and a broken empty Wild
Turkey bottle caught in the dirt, two imperfectly round
stones the color of an angry ocean
before the eye
of a storm. They become
the start, his decision
to invent a woman
from what he can’t know.
In the gathering,
he is not literal—no black
tupelo twigs for limbs, no
algae strands for hair. No,
he collects what he collects
because she is guiding him
to make her whole, complex
enough to hold his attention
for longer than the discovery
of each piece. There is only one
rule he follows:
he must be walking.
When I visit
my sister
next month, I will
think of you
still pretending
your banana
seat bicycle
with string-ray
handle bars
is a horse.
I wrote a love poem
to a tree. Now
I’m learning not to wait
for a reply.
Everyone is (a) pedestrian.
This corridor is mine
to crawl through to touch
the classless dream(.)
A thirty-minute measure
of time to get it done.
She must pave the road from town center
to rain puddle is a swimming hole
for her imaginary neighborhood. It’s time
to get it done. Their world, her creation,
is a cul-de-sac
of beach sand transported
by huge mechanical shovels, not
the wind. It’s time, before
she can no longer tell the difference
between the road and ditch,
to get it done. Why play
out here, her mother has asked,
when the ocean is just up the path
continuously slowly
hazarding the screened-in front
porch. But her mother just doesn’t get it.
It’s time, here in the back, to get it done. It’s not
about match box cars with real working door hinges
and tiny treaded tires. Any doll
she owns would be out of scale.
So the people of the neighborhood are invisible,
but no less in need
of roadways, driveways, articulated floor plans
for their homes. From where they live, she can’t see
East Chop or West Chop Light. But she can almost hear
the salt rumble on, miniature bay wave
tucking into itself. What gets trapped
in the air might preserve the village, or
it might rain. She doesn’t take chances—it’s time to get it done
before the bare red bulb lights up the back porch.
Sandusky is not merely amusement, not merely
a beer garden, bathhouse, dance
floor where the first lover
would begin to break
my hope over cold water. Edging Lake Erie,
a peninsula not an island
after all, Ohio’s tendency for hills. I stay away
to prevent roller coaster motion
sickness—we’re never cured
from the disease
of memory. What we get
if we’re very lucky, and the light
is with us, is
a daily reprieve from our inner ear’s relentless imbalance.
She believes she can stand tall against shadow,
affect the light
into afternoon, identify the stone
figure staring at her as she turns a corner
to enter
another establishment
old as sin. It could be
hers—wrapped into the dirty
canopy fabric above the narrow door.
* The title comes from the Preface to Luc Sante’s Low Life.
One of those downpours, it falls
hard and fast and is gone
before city gulls reach the south quays. No rainbow.
Wrong time of day. The smallest
of Calatrava’s bridges, a steel white winged bird
poised to take flight
over the Liffey. And she is
standing still, at the midway
point, her head bare and bowing forward. Searching
for a lost red scarf, she begins to let go
real tears, the way those embedded glass lights
have been smashed by vandals or too many cars rushing by.
As I admire water
falls as art, I lose
my anxious desire
for a chance
encounter with you. I never forgot you. Mainly scaffolding,
pumps, and piping, physics of the tangible
after inebriation splashes
into the river
of our souls. I know you
had one. Did you know
too? The East River is not really a river—
it’s a strait. Did we really converge
in a place where fresh and salt meet?
Did we meet at all? Lost in the mist
of my quiet life, I would not hear,
or see you, if you did approach behind me
till that empty basin
of a voice was spilling sound
through the air I breathe.
What do you think of this?
I would try to ignore what I think
I recognize because a quiet life requires
uninterrupted mesh
with holes to protect whatever might swim
into the loner’s intake filter pool. Fish might not penetrate
the fabric, but I can’t resist—I turn. There
you would be well
into midlife, like me. It wasn’t you,
it was the City I left
to catch my breath for 18 years.
Woman, is that you? Man, is that you?
Where we once moved in the dark
toward young urgency striking off
the planes of our bodies, we would now stand still,
stone pillars. The Brooklyn Bridge has sprung a leak, the world
is turning in
on itself. Wind trumps water, but not gravity. Water sways on its fall
below concrete and steel and wood. And still it’s the water
I bet my life on.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 