Two Poems by Stapleton Nash

Things To Miss

A few blue streamers taped to the air vents
Have just begun fluttering, weakly, weakly.
Annie is unconcernedly twiddling with a neon-painted Rubik’s cube.
She and Ivy are talking, the cadence of their voices lifting and falling
Like birds. Often I forget
That the sounds are words,
So the rare one I know comes as a surprise.

The window is hot, through itself, through the black paper,
Through the blind, through my shirt. Through AC
I have begun to shiver at night, begun to have
Cold, wintry dreams. Back to Dostoevskian snowfalls,
Old men scowling by train stations under red and frigid skies.
In these dreams, I wrap myself more closely in whatever my hands can grasp and think,
Remember that green place? That hot place?
I am gone from it. It is of another time. I have already begun the after part of life.

So, when I wake, the present feels like a regained past.
Back to a summer my subconscious thinks we have already
Escaped from. I have gone back. Back to now, the sweltering moment.
Ivy is drawing a pig. Maybe she’ll write my name beneath it.
I’d deserve it, for trying to run too fast out of this moment.
We discuss ice cream flavours and laugh;
“Vanilla” is hard to get off the tongue.

A poster, rolled up like a lightsaber.
A rather ill-used carton of watermelon milk.
A cicada, dead and turned belly-up on the sidewalk.
A collage of signs along the street, a mad jostle of capitalistic typography,
And yet this is considered merely suburb.
Snow has never seemed so far away.
A game of basketball in the gloaming,
The cement pouring this morning’s hoarded sun into the twilight.

Winter does come, though it drags its feet.
Dreams, eventually, do come true.
But for now, it is sticky, with the coming typhoon.
Don’t let me forget this, I think.
Don’t let me forget children’s voices, cicadas droning,
Red hornets the length of my thumb on the east coast.
Don’t let me forget the smell of it, how it sounded and looked, out there, out here.
Don’t let me forget what Angel told me about hungry ghosts,

Yongle era pottery, and missiles from the mainland,
About brides peeking out of their litters.
Don’t let me forget how it felt to be strange, and ugly, and alone,
And completely happy, like I had the power to make my own luck
From just the clouds and a piece of chilled fruit.

Waterfront

The words come. It is like
Thunder when you’re inside. It is
The wave that can swell and breach
And crest the seawall. Then
The silence. There can be weeks of it.

In the beginning, when I first walked
Upon that seawall, I thought
Any storm that came to pass would be the last.
But the moon is coming and going again,
There will never be a day when we have no more need
To be ready to take shelter.

The sea smells very fresh after a squall.
The sky is the blue of a kitten's eye, just open.
Tell me a story. Make it long.
Maybe afterwards, we’ll go below.
Or maybe, we will stay up and watch the stars come out.
Maybe we’ll conspire a way to swim between them.
Either way, we know we will cower again.
And we know we will be safe again.

Please check the keel and the ropes,
I’ll sound for depth and check the compasses,
And then come to bed.