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By Nick Flynn

Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedral
of salt. I keep


the entrance hidden, no one seems to notice
the hours I’m missing  …    I’ll


bring you one night, it’s where
I go when I


hang up the phone  …    


                                      Neither you
nor your soul is waiting for me at


the end of this, I know that, the salt
nearly clear after I


chisel out the pews, the see-through
altar, the opaque


panes of glass that depict the stations of
our cross — Here is the day


we met, here is the day we remember we
met  …    The air down here


will kill us, some say, some wear paper
masks, some still imagine the air above the green


trees, thick with bees


building solitary nests out of petals. What’s
the name for this? Ineffable? The endless


white will blind you, some say,
but what is there to see we haven’t already


seen? Some say it’s
like poking a stick into a river — you might as well


simply write about the stick.


Or the river.


Source: Poetry (June 2014)

  • Love
  • Religion

Poet Bio

Nick Flynn
Poet and memoirist Nick Flynn was born in Scituate, Massachusetts, on Boston’s South Shore. Most of the poems in his first collection, Some Ether, focus on Flynn’s tumultuous family life and include a detached yet affecting look at childhood and trauma. Having written about his family in both poetry and prose, Flynn has said, “The way I write I don’t see much distinction between the two, although prose seems more suited to daylight, and poetry to night. I try to cook both down to something essential—by the end hopefully some balance between mystery and clarity remains.” See More By This Poet

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