Water meets water,
she turns to witness
your exchange. A stick
snag mud morning
before the sun breaches
all birth of unwoven sound. She turns again
to wait
the long steel blue
wait. It’s got to be
a full moon tonight.
mississippi river
Travels to Saint Paul
If you are the Mississippi,
let me be
the Minnesota
flowing urgently
toward you, our
confluence
a point
of serious contention, water
marking all maps—virtual and real.
Upper Saint Anthony Falls Lock and Dam
As old as me—water
held to rise
level to the north, water
rushes out
level to the south.
The only true falls
the entire length of this mighty river.
I could be the lock master
in another life. Mitre-shaped,
the gates won’t open
till equilibrium returns. I wish
mine worked so well
after all these years.
Letter #3 to the Mississippi
She seeks a childhood face
along the East Bank, diverted and spilled onto
an empty road, old railroad
tracks framing its riverside.
That this widening band of water flowing south
could be the same river
as the tiny channel
she waded through yesterday up north,
that this unsalted navigational pulse
could reckon with her North Atlantic bias
could all be a signal
calling her to pause here
behind a brick building in an old rail yard
(only a slice of river visible) to see how
no other word, even in this midst,
besides saudade will do.
Carp Queen
I am her
royal highness perched low
on the Minnesota River’s north
bank. A beer cooler
my throne, a grain
elevator screeching
over the mucky muck
water cheers me on. My fishermen
hook big
flapping bottom
feeders, then hand me
one of their poles, and I bend
to pull the line
taut, lower, repeat,
the rod steadied against my royal blue
bibbed breasts. This battle becomes
the day’s drama—
it against me, the queen
23 times its size. Finally,
when I do pull it ashore,
a blotch of red in its gill,
one of my fishermen attends
to its release, the needle
nose pliers freeing it
unharmed—give or take
a lifetime of post
traumatic stress
disordering its course. I am
the carp queen sculling
the air with a regal wave
to the boys on a barge
passing before us on this sweaty river.
I hear their megaphone
pleas for me
to flee my banked fleet. But
even as I flirt
with those towing
cargo (be it soybean
or grain or freeze dried
myths) to the Mississippi River
bound for Red Wing, Rock
Island, Saint Louis, Ripley,
Natchez, New Orleans, somewhere
in between, my heart belongs
to these charming men seeking
the biggest carp, the better quip
to pass another Saturday
too hot for its own Minnesota
not so nice. They remind me. Her highness
is not so high
left alone on her portable perch, potable contents
sealed tight inside for now. Her highness
is referring to herself
in the third person again.
Mississippi Burden
Release me
from these lucid dreams. The more
I try to control the mind
toward a reencounter with you in a garden
level coffee bar, the less
I know about sleeping
flowers on this bluff
overlooking the confluence
of two rivers. What gets tended
in the dark could grow
into more than what I believe, a grace
over dogma rising
from sandy soil. I am carrying fear
in a basket my ancestral women transported
with time on their heads, by turns, to reach the big
river, to spill
the contents into turbulent waters,
to no longer believe in
the terror of the flood, the promise
of drought. So far, I am not
balancing it
on my head, but on my left hip
below the heart. I’m still hoping
you’ll catch my right
to pull me into your current, to take everything
from me, so I have nothing left
to drop.
Upper Mississippi Tone (Day 2,426: Take 2)
On a grayscale
from blizzard to moonless
night, she rates you scattered
clouds and the smiling bright
new 35W Bridge.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 