I may (dis)honor the memory
of our affair. No number
of lies will erase clouds
from a June sky. A man lies
in an empty garbage cart—the clean-up
crew waits for another festival
to end. Can a phone company’s window display
do justice to this first
skyscraper the City sent up
over itself? No one’s going to remember
I worked there too.
A walk on the just opened stretch
of High Line is hardly
the wild side. If this is my lizard
brain jotting down
these notes, I may as well slam
back another mug
of black coffee, check the time
on my cell every ten
minutes, keep walking
into fragmented images,
unconscious hues
of primitive thought. I’ll stick out
a forked tongue to hail
a cab for the memory
of other rides and rest
stops to be secured.
Enamor is a taste
more than a color. Extrovert
texture. Black cherry—there’s a hue.
Signage means more to her
than the shape
of these chairs. Positive thinking
is a song.
Free associate my home
with rehab. Go ahead. Ivy here entwines
a power line, a Jefferson Lines bus
gets towed. I’m on our only light
rail train traveling south. Will make an exit
by air. Wherever I go, I must
rehabilitate or stall out.
Burned out, abandoned with warnings that exhale
on the stern facade. One letter per pane, tagger’s red
paint spells it out for me:
E L E V A T O R
S H A F T
D O N O T
E N T E R Never mind
the barbed wire fence, I
wasn’t planning to make that leap. The clock
on that shuttered Romanian community center across
the street reminds me
it’s 5:45 pm
same as last fall and the visit before that. Still there will be
more stairs to climb.
Yesterday morning his brows, last
night armpit hair—adolescence breaks
opens my curiosity. Childless,
I take care not to steal
childhoods, not to smash
them against sea walls
to see what’s inside. Once
hormones begin to kick
in—give the boys the goods
to confound girls, other boys.
I get careless. No more promises
to make before civil twilight.
His brows came to me
in an early morning
dream—the phase between involuntary
twitching and vision adjusting
to new light. What was irresistible
becomes grotesque. Even I have limits
to exaggeration. My love is
not exponential.
Some of it becomes invisible. Still,
I am pleased to open
my eyes to engage expressions
as they appear.
Get any closer to the mouth
piece could kill you. The bitch
in me steps outside
the invisible line I draw
each morning. I wasn’t paying
attention. Never thought I could
turn anything out. But fear
and pride conspire to plot
a demise—not mine. Not a suicide
left in the garden.
Within minutes
of waking, she loses
power. What gets restored
smells different
in a more constant
light. It’s here, there—observed,
or not. If she can turn herself in
to weather in all its variations,
(in)visibility, she might just fit
inside this untethered moment.
In rain and close
air, the empty park haunts
her view of what could
have been. More solitude
than romance, determination
not despair, yet this damp
quietude distorts all patterns. Subdued
till a lone man trots along
the southern path. A leather jacket
will need peeling
in sudden heat. And still
she can’t see where ghosts go
to sweat it out.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 