For Steve
Taken from the vault,
it gets warbled, deeper, slurred
when the batteries inside begin to rot
and seep. Recorded
on the west bank
of the Saint Croix River before I knew
what that meant, our conversation
was my monologue—became yours—then
it just stopped.
For Steve
I can’t find you
on the northwest side
of this urban courtyard
without knowing true
north or any other kind
of truth—save you
are too soon gone.
For Steve
There’s a voice missing
from this conversation.
The hollow buzz is breaking more
than my ear drums.
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.
Riding the rails through
an afternoon comes
easier than staying
put face
to face with imminent
death. Or not. To those
gone but not
gone, she says
these tracks are her prayer.
* From Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur
She cannot translate darkness
from those days when the sun only exaggerates
cold, only teases with its light. The blank
scrim separating her from us does not give forth
a familiar word or shape to fill
in with pointillist tools or hatched lines. It stares
back without a batting, no shadow limbs
to move behind it, without one
eyelash dropping free
on her cheek. She can only see as far
as it opens before her—all of a life truncated
at 22, more than twice that
number of years swinging
without interpretation. What tongue
do the dead whisper in as they do the math?
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 