Author: Amy Nawrocki

I am a poet with six poetry collections and three history books, co-authored by my husband and muse, Eric D. Lehman. I teach English and Creative Writing at the University of Bridgeport.
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First Day of Class

Prototype

Bless the first day of class
with its confined clutter. Notebooks
stacked and piled like sculptures
that say to the first lesson, I am ready
for you to feed me. Catapult us
into the realms of academia.
Picture chimpanzees swallowing
pineapple-white sheets in open cages.

Get your hands dirty, I tell them,
love the pages, the print, smell it
and remember papyrus. Break
the spine, hold it up to the light:
tell me who you are, author, tell
me your secrets; help me make sense
of your world. Transmogrify.
Cave dwellers, hierophants—make friends
with the exclamation point, bond
with the asterisk. Play with dirt.
Play with dirty words.

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Proof of Existence

Distilling Sol Lewitt

Obliterate, says the line
curve the horizon, resist
tremors of an inexact hand
tap into the statuesque control
of an oblique axis, linger
in the infinite advance; find proof
of existence between the abscissa
and the ordinate, between Euclid
and Descartes, between an arrow
and its trajectory.

Sol Lewitt’s work is on permanent display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; poem from Reconnaissance.

 

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Ordinary Acts

A Gathering of Sorts

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As morning curdles its way to noontime,
autumn plays its lazy guitar.
To join the living world,
we make our way to the post office
with enough change in hand for three stamps.
Their duty is delivering messages:
a utility bill, the insurance payment, a letter
to a friend. In the front of the line,
a woman’s daughter spins
and spins in her orbit.
Gathering packages in his arms,
a man, Santa-like in tweed jacket
and leather cap, stands beside
a painter covered in plaster.
He sways and looks away
from us, staring instead into
the clouds of his day.

Each day we perform ordinary acts:
we teach algebra, refinance mortgages,
cook dinner, journey to the moon.

Each day a mixture of light and color
penetrates our trust. We place our faith
in little things: the oak’s red summit,
a stamped envelope,
holding the door for each other
as we enter and leave each other’s lives.

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A girl and a book

I’m reading a biography of L.M. Montgomery (by Jane Urquhart, Extraordinary Canadians Series), a poignant story of the writer’s life which makes her fiction even more meaningful. The new series Anne with an E is also worthwhile. One of my mother’s favorite books, Anne never made it to my bookshelf until I was much older. My parents, on my mother’s urging I’m sure, honeymooned on Prince Edward Island in 1970. To honor what would have been their 47th wedding anniversary, here is my poem.

The Resuscitating Tonic of Make-Believe

After the fifth or sixth closing of a now tethered
hardback edition, (her grandmother’s copy)
she sent Anne of Green Gables back
to the bookcase without ceremony or accolades
with only the guarded impulses of a pact
made between bosom friends: a girl and a book.
Even before her young lips knew
the timid inklings of what might
be later recognized as true love,
she had the entire exploit pinned down
like tissue paper patterned onto checkered gingham.

Someday, she’d bring him, her own Gilbert,
whoever he might manifest as, wherever
she might find him, to red clay sea cliffs of Anne’s
Prince Edward Island, leave the silk dress,
tuxedo jacket and champagne toasts behind
at the chapel, board the ferry and seek out
the lake of the shining waters, where fields
of tall grasses swoon in the breeze and hollyhocks
chime like wedding bells. But someday seems

an unreachable planet when one is thirteen.
The resuscitating tonic of make-believe begins
to peter out like a late August waterfall; thirsty
pragmatism piles up where once fluid imaginings
squeezed between a book’s secretive folds. Flipping
to the last page, she predicts that happily-ever-after
will look good pressed into malleable paper,
but such endings, with their achieved resolutions,
belong only to red-headed heroines, not real girls
who collect bookmarks and play tuba in the band.

cutting the cakeferne and ed honeymoon

The poem appears in Reconnaissance, published by Homebound Publications; second edition 2017 is now available.

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Shadows of Paris

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In honor of Eric D. Lehman’s novella Shadows of Paris winning the Silver Medal from Foreward INDIES Book Award, here is my poem from Lune de Miel.

 

History of a Table

 

The bar where Henry Miller drank

tenders a thin table beneath a mirrored wall

scoping author’s portraits and patrons who filter

into booths and pout with espresso mouths.

I am only apprenticing Paris. We’ve scrapbooked

ourselves here to dip into the ink of artists like us

who came to loot and ransack the city, to hunt

amid gray, cobbled streets, take the surly and brooding

pelt of phenomenon and deposit a littered alphabet

of new and debaucherous talismans. My pen

trembles, and I ache to write myself into a version

of original sin, revel in the profanity of life,

and spit into my inkwell.  Beneath Hemingway

my new husband scribbles in his moleskin.

I fix my eyes toward the ring on his hand.

 

By the time my cocktail abandons me

I have taken custody of the deserted chronicles

left long ago on tap handles and between floorboards.

My husband closes his book; we leave on the table

a handprint of coins and a pocket of space.

The apprenticeship ends with the looted winter air

sweeping us into the amulet of the Paris night.

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Dunes of Heather

 

IMG_9370Loch Tay

Between the castle and the Loch—
a long way by car—
we harness wet
shadowless views of fells
and sloped valleys.IMG_9572
Between the bald hills
and our partially cobbled way,
dunes of heather
roll out like quilts over
the bracken-covered
hillocks where sheep graze
quietly, unaware of anything
but the taste of clover and
the crunch of yellowed grass.
While hedges of purple
sprawl across the hilly pass,
the rain only seeks to glisten
the already blurry passing of time.

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from our 2011 trip to ScotlandIMG_9407

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Normandy

Amy Nawrocki's avatarAmy Nawrocki

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Eric at Gold Beach in Normandy, 2014

“The Leaves are Falling off the Trees”  ~Normandy 2014

Tanks do not float
and we cannot go backwards.

West to east, last to first
8:00 to 6:30
Juno Sword
Gold Utah
Omaha

Resistance bicycles, full moon,
coca cola, chewing gum,
cigarettes.

Donkey in a small fenced field.
Cemetery cat, friendly, fat, chaffinches.
Sacrifice, courage, cowardice.
How does your garden grow?

Ten thousand crosses—With eyes squinted,
the markings look
like school children holding hands.
Red beach, barbed wire.
Omaha.

Fox green, fox red.
Easy green, easy red.
Dog
white, green, red.
Paratrooper.
Charlie.

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First Editions

To celebrating the release of the second edition of Reconnaissance, enjoy this poem about first editions. Click the title to order your own first edition at a special discounted price.

The Thief

I apprenticed well. For a sixth grade project,
Mrs. Montecalvo taught me the worth
of a good forgery when she assigned
the footnoted history of a painter
and encouraged an attempt at imitation.

Seeing Monet’s Westminster Bridge reprinted
in Reader’s Digest, I modeled my own
with schoolgirl brushes and an aptitude
for blending. I typed his biography
on a blue Remington, stenciled a title page,
punched symmetrical holes and glued
the masterpiece into a pocketed folder.
I never got the stink of acrylic off my fingers.

 

bridge 1 3 001
After Monet: Westminster Bridge, Acrylic on paper, circa 1985 

 

Audacity and small victories: these
are gateways for any scavenger.
Once one is secure in the false flat
of a sloped horizon, transformations
are easy: an open book, so to speak.

I pocketed the Collected Poems
of ee cummings wholesale, tore
the bar code from the last page
and slipped its frayed spine between
loose-leaf sheets of unlined
but perforated notebooks. Long after,
the card catalog entry went away too.

Like other trophies, I just stored it,
held it in a box of pressed flowers
and half memorized poems, among
generous piles of pens and paint brushes,
newspaper clippings and dirty love letters
scribbled on the backs of postcards.
For these corruptions I’ve paid only
in callouses and broken pencil tips.
Despite my best calligraphy,
slippery pens have crossed out
entire lines carefully typeset in Linotype
or Century Schoolbook, my marks bleeding
through pages now unreadable.

In the gray area between homage
and sacrilege, I thieve too much:
red wheelbarrows pile full of leaves and dirt
and burnable logs pressed into the pulp
of scrap paper or woven into stretchable
canvases. Little I see in nature
that is my own. I stole van Gogh’s sadness
and painted it on my shoulder.
Like Olympia, I learned how to stare.

Next time, let me mimic the syntax of bridges
and throw sand over wet, stolen ink.
Let me trust in surveillance. Once the thief
learns to discern original from run of the mill
everything is a first edition; everything
is one of a kind.