It’s 9 am
on a Saturday
in April, do you know where
your Please
Kill Me t-shirt
is? Who you were
with the first time
you listened to Chronic
Town all the way through?
Gardening at night
is not always as romantic
as it seems. Mumbling may be
a gift of genius,
or merely of the arrogant
camouflaging an inferiority
complex the size of a bull’s eye
on that t-shirt
in XXXL. Or, it could all be
a joke—the way
we equate enunciating
with the truth.
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.
A dream is only as true
as its recounting. Insert stalks
of wheatgrass embedded
in translucent partitions
for accent. An ocean
spilling forth on all sides
gets pulled inside
out to become a Midwestern
lake not frozen enough
to hold those images
of ice fishers under
glass. You shake
yourself awake
to make up
what you won’t remember
one hour into it.
“Let’s put our heads together, start a new country up.
Underneath the river bed, we burned the river down.
This is where they walked, swam, hunted, danced, and sang.
Take a picture here, take a souvenir. Cuyahoga. Cuyahoga, gone.”
—from the song “Cuyahoga,” by Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe (REM)
Back in ’88 the hottest heat
wave to hit parts known only to me
for those it was so cold
stories. Post-modern infill spills
onto Old Main Street. The big river never looked
so sad. I would not wade across it
for decades. Just not ready to embrace
that middle seam going all the way up. I didn’t know
the young, crooked one would boomerang
back into my life. I would grow
into the bridge between those two
that would never meet outside
my heart before it became a souvenir.
Night & Day Poems of Amy Nash 