A giant billboard boasts
the intrinsic appeal
of Duluth in winter. A woman paces back
and forth beside a café table
as she talks on her cell. I wouldn’t
want to live in a cave
or a cell or
Duluth any time
of year. I’m always early—
overestimating the duration
of everything. I might wait
in a cave
or a cell
for a meeting with one of those blues
harp players who’s never
on time. I don’t think
I’d wait in Duluth.
No famous mobile
cutouts on a lawn
will work. A classic dance
piece from 1958
won’t do. None of those
instantly recognizable faces
disturbing the natural
world. Not a mountain—
or cave for gangster ghosts.
The names I know
come from the wrong
household. Your voice
seeps through a vent
beneath the porch.
Meet me there.
She stands outside the mouth
in fear—it tastes like dirt—
a gummy red, soulful clay soil.
She passes through
this entrance daily
to travel into that deep, pitch,
sometimes dank, place
inside herself
where she plucks poems
from vines. Too dangerous now,
this passage might cave
into her, she might crumble
into a thousand tiny pieces
of a broken heart.
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.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 