Hands over hands—a grip.
Kiss the knuckles to grasp
the meaning of love
without words.
Poetry
December 24 (Day 2,593)
Half page ads peddle faith
in 45-minute segments
by the hour on two campuses.
And a website to worship. A faltered blizzard
reminds her of her own faith—how
it works better
without a forecast, without
a Twitter account. Not
a without—a within.
Winter Solstice
A man in the corner
of the corner
bar sings “Moonshiner.”
A beat-up harmonica
gets swiped
across his mouth
between lines. She’s returning
from the dark side
again—bottled
water to her lips.
Leporello
She wails when he plays
it. If only those bellows were paper,
she might forgive
her father this disturbance.
Her mother says
he’s a little off
key—she should know. But
that’s not it. Her distress
is buried in the mechanics
of what we inherit.
No Empty
No time to mourn, to encounter
rubble in a hole
before retail monster walls
rise above. Dismantling
December air, live
instruments and raw
voices not welcome
in this symmetrical disaster.
Uptown bans all scars.
Day 2,580
Residue cadence over steel,
chilled, is a drink
she would sip
on cold nights to remind
him how she could look
when not trying
to be so permanent. The seep
continues beneath
frozen surfaces—silently.
Reify
Turn a soccer ball inside
out. Make a purse. Hang acetate
images of typewriters
from your ears. See the man
(the top of his head cropped
off) with a smoke
dangling
from his mouth in a print
on that wall in this café
where you can
no longer smoke. Make
a clutch with your lips. Try
not to cry out
those same old words. I’ve tried
this before—difficult but
not impossible to take shape
in warmed hands.
Walden Ripple Effect
Until she loses herself
to light in truncation,
to upside down black and
white photos of bridges—
some smiles do turn
down—till then, she will not
find herself
having faith in those infinite
relations and figure eights
swooning over sidewalks.
Taking the Cure from the Pennsylvania Wood
She cannot resist the slate
surface of your skin strengthening
the faith in hers. The floor reverberates
with the heartbeat of a hummingbird
she sees in the corner
of the sky she forgot to touch.
The scent of rain falling on slate
draws her to you. In her faltering, she believes
the echoes will never smell
this sweet again. She cannot see
the hummingbird but knows she heard
its hunger spill over the deck. Recycled
boards stack up to the ceiling,
broken open
by diamond-shaped clerestory windows.
She’s not cheating,
she’s using her resources. The black stone
path of possibility shrinks at the edge
of her thought. Purple gems block the gray
light. You are free to live
with her beside the ocean now
that the sun has settled down. And the wind will smash
the glass panes into fragments
of salted lies—a beautiful disaster.
Ignition (Day 2,584)
A trough to fill
with sand and water. An army
to protect our beeswax
block of candle. The thing itself
is worth saving
till that moment
our wick heads appear
to coax relief
from concentrating
too much before
dinner guests arrive, their boots
caked in glorious earth.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 