Welcome to your usual
table by the window, to a few
stories behind the Soo Line
clock on the corner. Welcome
back diamond-shaped
laughter without a live
audience. The flowers
you ordered for your mother
should arrive in time
to whisper one more welcome
before walking through
another open door.
She can count
to infinity, or
as long as she lives
to write. Poems
are tallies in a growing series
of figure eights. Notches
in the leg
of a wooden desk—
here’s where
it gets locked
in. Little deaths
and tremendous sighs
of relief
when another one clicks.
Twenty-one-year-old
speakers and receiver and
tuner and equalizer and memory
of how I would buy
and pay anything
to get closer
to that bastard
of young
with the voice. To replace
it all now
terrifies me. The sound
of anticlimax
is lonely and loud—
the young turned
fifty years ago.
A door-to-door
salesman who sells doors,
he can’t hang on
a gate without
walls or a fence
to give it purpose. He swings
on bars
parallel to nothing
anyone can see. But he does,
and it’s hinged
in brass. And
he won’t stop there.
No chance for nighttime
dreaming—a neighbor’s dance
beat disruptions wreck
any hope
of true REM. Her tolerance
for talking to drunks
has diminished
over a decade in reprieve
till it’s shrunk
to the size of a single shot
of espresso
she’s going to sip
in the morning start-over.
There’s a story behind
Staten Island Ferry
orange. I can’t tell
it but can hear its tone
revealed in a soothing voice-
over through early morning fog.
Routine commuting becomes heightened
by the transcendent
moments before
the marathon begins
on the Verrazano
Narrows Bridge. By a skyline
permanently scarred, by a keel
built with steel
from collapsed towers, by film
and TV footage of our favorite
characters crossing one way
or the other. Sometimes someone
who’s had too much
winds up where he started
without getting closer
to home. Color
declares, or hides, or widens
the channel for multiple
interpretations. Always the same
orange, always the same
distance either way.
A giant billboard boasts
the intrinsic appeal
of Duluth in winter. A woman paces back
and forth beside a café table
as she talks on her cell. I wouldn’t
want to live in a cave
or a cell or
Duluth any time
of year. I’m always early—
overestimating the duration
of everything. I might wait
in a cave
or a cell
for a meeting with one of those blues
harp players who’s never
on time. I don’t think
I’d wait in Duluth.
She sees an old station
wagon with faux wood
paneling parked on the street
outside the Armory—now a parking
garage. In by 9, stay till 3
for the early bird special. It’s not
the ‘70s. She can’t hear Johnny
Nash sing “I Can See Clearly Now”
from an AM radio. Nothing
good can come from trying
to go back there. In a dream,
she is driving to Texas
on interstates in the dark
behind her sister and brother-in-law
till she remembers:
she doesn’t drive.
Who only wears
shades of red
(with black). I could never be
her—the way I give it
away with my eyes. You’ll know
my heart by how
I hold my mouth. All the black
(and red into pink)
won’t shield me
from exposing
the truth on the street.
Never been to Colorado. Don’t know
if I ever will get
over that desire to go
East. With exceptions, a 10-mile
strip of land on either bank
of the Mississippi
River is my invisible
electric fence. A fuchsia
corduroy overcoat and sea
green fishnet
sweater can absorb the shock
only so much.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 