Everyone’s talking
about the dirt
she ate. About the myths
she created to defy
those creation myths
she read in a fog.
People return to the bluff
seeking some redemption
in a poet’s stare.
What’s she hiding—what was that
she just spit out
onto the stained
concrete floor?
dirt
Day 3,115
The taste of dish
soap in her coffee ruins
any chance to spill
dirt about you and that fire
fighter beneath her lilac bush
before it rains.
Esther to Lester
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.
Or Wave
She believes the dirt
can talk, trees and wind join in—this nonverbal
world says more to her
than the one she keeps trying to define
and confine herself to. Poetry
of numbers in vibration is
music. She sees the face
of a god over Big Sur cliffs—sand mixed in.
Cell Phone Cyclops
A camera placed
in my hand for the first time
in as long as a road
of memory can wind
into back woods, I’m an uncertain
chronicler. Not sure how
to make a record
this way, not sure I want to
tell a story. I might prefer to steal
an image or two and retreat
to the dirt on that trail.
Geophagy
Watching the time drag
itself through the driest
dirt, she wants to kneel
into it and scoop
handfuls into her gaping
mouth, wants to swallow expectations
whole. Then spit them out.
She knows she can’t
have it both ways.
Wry
Into that laughter she takes
a wrong turn, lands
outside a stone
wall where vines bare
their veins. The host separates
direct light from parallel lines
across
wind-stirred dirt. She picks it up
at the last possible moment
before rain drowns out sound.
Window Washer
It’s not a stone
against this pane.
It’s that blade hitting it—
dirt of my life
dripping down.
Sycamore (Day 1,353)
In the throes
of my intention
disorder, I forget
your name, how to reach
the top of you, how to
let go of those limbs
you wave over me.
In these fits, the stories
I tell are not mine
except when they are.
That I come from ash,
that my mother left me
in the rain
without a skeleton
shelter, that I still
eat dirt (raw not baked)—
these are some of the ones
I intend to qualify
when I no longer suffer
from disease over the way
jacks wish to cut you down.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 