If she rushes, she can reach the farmers
market before metal saw
horses get collapsed, planks
loaded onto the truck, leftover
watermelon rolled away. If
she slows down, she might catch
a note or two trapped
inside clouds from last night’s concert
under the stars in collision
with a 24-hour jack hammer
breaking up a bridge.
I must learn how
to describe each tiny movement
from solid green to a yellow brushed with red breaking
into orange without
these blocks of language. I turn up the volume
when this instrumental plays—sweet
guitar sings vocal lines, the human voice
at rest. Seductively rich
baritone be still
for these moments, while I work
on my lesson, a thing I am to practice
with my soul—
without a bridge.
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.
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.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 