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)
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