Before the street made sense, became a boulevard
with flower beds and urban strength
trees, she entered
the roadhouse to seep
into wood. To be
the end. It is
gone. She is
not. Up the long block—a lengthening
stretch of cars, do not
honk, go fast, poets cling
to their voices under beams
compressing breath and scars.
Days in a week, deadly
sins, cardinal
numeral,
the Sabbath,
veils, virgin
daggers,
sacraments
spill onto the eighth
month. Only three
of them can stain
that late summer
block of moments.
Three of them
going back in time:
August 27, 2012
At civil dawn
my father gasps, slips
into death
for infinity.
The saddest relief
shuttles through my veins.
August 7, 2012
Twenty days before
I lose my father,
a rupture
inside your head
kills you. You see infinity.
Return to this.
And the third one
in another century:
August 17, 1980
In a half
circle, friends
drink beer
in your family’s kitchen
the night our eyes
first meet.
Never
mind
infinity,
time
collapses
urgently,
immediately.
We go
forward, backward, sideways
in a trance—
desperate to remember
how it feels to be so young,
to still believe
we are immortal.
Objects:
Our dead friend
moves our limbs, our mouths,
our lids, our hearts.
Marionettes and
so much more.
He releases our strings
simultaneously. Knows
it’s futile to fight the laws
of physics
even from his side.
Subjects:
Despite the forecast,
rain begins to slap
awake an etherized sky.
Our skin protects
those young spies
dressed in our eyes
testing our voices
as they prepare
to go.
You and I—
none of anyone else’s
goddamn business.
Never mind the mermaids,
we’ve gotten so far
beyond the bath.
Note: partially inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
(originally posted July 30, 2013)
I could use a child’s wooden foot
stool to reach the last
days of July. Painted red
or a mustard almost
too rich to see
in summer. So much has been written
about April’s
cruelty, but it is the majestic
peak of August
I cannot bear. Such a short distance
to pitch and tuck
into a somersault
down an observatory crowned
hill toward fall. Before
the month ends,
my father will die
all over again, and life will continue
without him. No ladder will stretch
high enough into the sky
to reach all those stars we reckoned our spirits with.
A nonstop flight
to the central dead
letter office. No unnecessary
sentimental greetings
outside security. No wait
at the airport tram
station.
No line when she arrives.
An easy drop
into the maw
of a gigantic shredder.
Bits of bile-singed pulp
get spit out.
Dross, even slag,
to be recycled
into her next
line-breaking monster.
She hears a talking crosswalk sign
in her head, stuck on
| wait | wait | wait |
never getting permission to walk
she will do it anyway
eventually the robot
dies from brutality or neglect
Not a confluence
of two rivers—the calmest
bay sandwiched between
two chops of land.
In her eyes, the front
porch always faces the water.
There ponds and marshes,
even a lagoon, keep the backyard
from drying up. There
no longer knows her footprints.
She walks nowhere
barefoot now. Trespasses
without leaving any ID.
She’s so invisible
she’s free to follow
the oxbow bending
road to its eventual dead end.
A foghorn begins to sound.
When the sun rises, first
where you are,
then an hour later
outside my apartment window,
we can see the flames
of a billion candles
inside each moment
if we resist the urge
to swipe our fingers
through the tips. Just for kicks
the way we did
when we were too young
to believe in death.
I am the governess
of my feelings. You, yours.
A bigger fire begins
to burn through the day
into night. Some liar’s pit
on a hill behind a school.
We could be tossing in
all kinds of combustibles.
My governess lets me
stay out all night now,
no questions asked.
It all hinges
on that first kiss—
the one that already happened,
plotted out a billion years ago.
Not one locked gate,
milk chute for crawling through,
car ignition. Not
a single regret.
Hey, summer solstice,
almost winter solstice here.
We call across an overlapping ribbon
to one another. No echo. No stanza.
No station necessary
in this endless ride. Everything
so perfectly compacted into
longest day shortest night longest night shortest day
stretching every fiber, nerve, strand.
Here we are two specks of gold
glitter stuck to a loop. A pattern
on an ancient sea turtle’s shell. Left earlobe
of a giant with wine-flavored tattoos.
We can’t take our eyes off the horizon
till the inner ear balances. Till vertigo
becomes the rippled gown of Veritas.
We are so broken into imperfect shards
of stained glass, so beyond trick photography
in this crazy 8 ball shaken down world.
If the whale returns
no longer white.
If a disembodied Cocteau hand
refuses to feed her
the next morning.
If Peter Walsh sells his pocketknife
and Septimus renounces
iron fences. If
she hadn’t feared
needles. If he had.
When Buckminster Fuller meets
Isamu Noguchi
in a Greenwich Village tavern. When
Broadway meets Fifth Avenue
to birth a 22-story skyscraper.
When brackish water splashes onto her deck.
A ferry paused in a channel.
If she touches your lower lip
with her left pinky.
When a gently pressed fingerprint
becomes the new memory.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 