Abandoned and crowded, you
are my calm in a steady roar
on a warm Sunday afternoon.
Hidden but no secret, you
remind me to cease
my underestimation
of the middle. Oceans
are my soul edges—today
here lies my heart. Just for today.
ocean
Sea Dumpster Divers
What the storm asserted
the wave to lash,
what the hull cracking
separated bow from stern forever,
what settled to ocean floor slowly
will reconstitute salvaged treasure.
If two people
someday dive into our wreck—
and they will—to collect
our splintered mass
of a life gone askew,
piece by piece,
what they bring to the surface,
what they examine
will be the new us,
will be a restoration,
regeneration, the religion of us
carted to the surface
alive in their palms.
The Founding (Day 2,244)
He finds her one
piece at a time
along railroad tracks, in riverbeds, beneath
piers, over gutters. It takes
months to find her mouth,
but the hands appear
without effort. His search begins
when he’s walking
along the shoulder
of a dusty road
outside a town he has considered home. Not
so much anymore. A patch
of sapphire light
in the distance drags him
into the brush—a freight
line that time forgot. Wild flowers
he knows someone would call weeds,
except for that color. It draws him in. There, surrounded
by ties and a broken empty Wild
Turkey bottle caught in the dirt, two imperfectly round
stones the color of an angry ocean
before the eye
of a storm. They become
the start, his decision
to invent a woman
from what he can’t know.
In the gathering,
he is not literal—no black
tupelo twigs for limbs, no
algae strands for hair. No,
he collects what he collects
because she is guiding him
to make her whole, complex
enough to hold his attention
for longer than the discovery
of each piece. There is only one
rule he follows:
he must be walking.
Civil Twilight
A thirty-minute measure
of time to get it done.
She must pave the road from town center
to rain puddle is a swimming hole
for her imaginary neighborhood. It’s time
to get it done. Their world, her creation,
is a cul-de-sac
of beach sand transported
by huge mechanical shovels, not
the wind. It’s time, before
she can no longer tell the difference
between the road and ditch,
to get it done. Why play
out here, her mother has asked,
when the ocean is just up the path
continuously slowly
hazarding the screened-in front
porch. But her mother just doesn’t get it.
It’s time, here in the back, to get it done. It’s not
about match box cars with real working door hinges
and tiny treaded tires. Any doll
she owns would be out of scale.
So the people of the neighborhood are invisible,
but no less in need
of roadways, driveways, articulated floor plans
for their homes. From where they live, she can’t see
East Chop or West Chop Light. But she can almost hear
the salt rumble on, miniature bay wave
tucking into itself. What gets trapped
in the air might preserve the village, or
it might rain. She doesn’t take chances—it’s time to get it done
before the bare red bulb lights up the back porch.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 