Are you Flaubert’s least
untrue, she won’t dare
ask for fear
your reply might smack
her cheek, lick her lip,
keep her
reaching for more
paint and wall.
Poetry
Day 1,487
I am the scriptio
inferior, I am
the underwriting
of myself. I cannot
wash away the dialogues
I have had with amnesia,
cannot forget
my desire to be seen.
With each alcoholic
palimpsest, I became
powder, irretrievable,
invisible
to myself. With each
reprieve, I am making
a record of what my disease
did not erase.
Preparing for the Change
September rain not really falling,
but has fallen. Clouds mess
with her chance to witness
another civil
twilight. But a western gleam
signals another shift. And
she wishes she could find the hidden white
pine forest, tucked into it
creek, where she would be safe to write
his name in the needle bed
dirt without
getting found out.
But branches get so heavy
this time of year. Hotter
and hotter, later till
that moment when it gets very cool.
Muse in Relief
I carve you alive
with my own
chiseled lips. I make you
because I was made
by another
nervous dreamer.
Your brows are
what rise when I’m done
with your face.
You smile—
with your flat
stone eyes
and male mouth,
but it’s those brows
you give me
to unwrap myself with
when my own
next sitting draws near.
You and Your Confluence
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.
Roadhouse Revisited (Day 365)
She will answer her own question
with another question wrapped
inside a brilliantly clean
pattern of reds, blacks, gold—
a pattern bleeding into another,
into another without end. “Will I
make it to the roadhouse
without dying tonight?” Spotting
an unraveling of the veil
of delusion, she picks beautiful silk
threads off the floor
where in desperation she knelt
to ask for help. Another weave in deep
ocean blue overlays the red,
the black, the gold. Indefinite articles
worn loosely over shoulders
could warm Caryatid to release
her boulder, to recover
her posture without a pose.
And so she does make it
to the roadhouse tonight
for a cup of hot black
light roast breathing
free—divine for now.
Siren
She wonders what song
the Sirens sang
when they lured
men to their beds
for tortured pleasure
and the prospect
of oysters
on half shells floating
in the sky at night.
She wonders if she
could hum the tune
herself (without blushing).
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.
Northern Sources
Into the marsh go
questions of origin. Answers
rarely come out.
To name
a place is to be so bold
as to believe
in harnessing habitats
for one’s own. At least
as long as it takes
for a new map
to be drawn and published.
I prefer to believe
in the unfolding
and refolding
of lyric terrains—they sing
for themselves.
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.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 