Some Ether Poems

by Flynn, Nick

• ISBN13: 9781555973032
• ISBN10: 1555973035
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Graywolf Press

Summary

Winner of a "Discovery"/The NationAward Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry Some Etheris one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Etherresonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

Author Biography

Nick Flynn is a member of Columbia University's Writing Project and lives in Brooklyn. He is also the author of Blind Huber.

Table of Contents

The Visible Woman
Bag of Mice	3	(1)
Fragment (found inside my mother)	4	(1)
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands	5	(1)
You Ask How	6	(2)
1967	8	(1)
Trickology	9	(1)
The Visible Woman	10	(1)
And Then, And Then	11	(2)
My Mother Contemplating Her Gun	13	(2)
Ago	15	(2)
Radio Thin Air	17	(1)
Sudden	18	(1)
Emptying Town	19	(4)
Oceanic
Angelization	23	(1)
Cartoon Physics, part 1	24	(2)
Memento Mori	26	(2)
Flood	28	(2)
Flashback	30	(3)
No Map	33	(2)
Wild with Dandelions & Roses	35	(3)
Other Meaning	38	(2)
The Robot Moves!	40	(1)
How Do You Know You're Missing Anything?	41	(4)
Devil Theory
Seven Fragments (found inside my father)	45	(2)
Glass Slipper	47	(1)
Father Outside	48	(2)
Salt	50	(1)
Sunday	51	(2)
Two More Fragments	53	(2)
Curse	55	(1)
Man dancing with a paper cup	56	(1)
Prayer	57	(1)
Stylite (fragment # 10)	58	(1)
Elsewhere, Mon Amour	59	(4)
Ether
Cartoon Physics, part 2	63	(2)
The cellar a machine whirring through the night	65	(1)
Her Smoke (her trick)	66	(2)
Splenectomy	68	(1)
Five Hundred Years	69	(1)
Worthless	70	(1)
Soft Radio	71	(3)
Residue	74	(2)
Peach	76	(1)
You moved me through each room	77	(1)
Fugue	78	(2)
Twenty-Pound Stone	80	(1)
Some Ether	81	(1)
God Forgotten	82	(3)
Notes	85

Excerpts

Chapter One

    Bag of Mice

I dreamt your suicide note

was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,

& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag

opened into darkness,

smoldering

from the top down. The mice,

huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag

across a shorn field. I stood over it

& as the burning reached each carbon letter

of what you'd written

your voice released into the night

like a song, & the mice

grew wilder.

    Fragment (found inside my mother)

I kept it hidden, it was easy

to hide, behind my lingerie, a shoebox

above my boys' reach, swaddled alongside

my painkillers

in their childproof orange cups. I knew my kids,

curious, monkeys,

but did they know me? It was easy

to hide, it waited, the hard 0 of its mouth

made of waiting, each bullet

& its soft hood of lead. Braced

solid against my thigh, I'd feed it

with my free hand, my robe open

as if nursing, practicing

my hour of lead, my letting go. The youngest

surprised me with a game,

held out his loose fists, begging

guess which hand, but both

were empty. Who taught him that?

    The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands

Everyday, something--this time

a French ship with all her passengers & crew

slides into the North Sea, the water so cold

it finishes them. Nothing saved

but a life ring stenciled GRACE,

cut loose from its body. A spokesman can only

state his surprise

that it doesn't happen more often.

Last August, as I rode the ferry

from here to the city, a freak storm

surprised everyone,

& the Captain, forced below,

asked for a show of hands

as to whether we should go on. A woman beside me

hid her entire head in her jacket

to light a cigarette.

For years I had a happy childhood,

if anyone asked I'd say, it was happy .

    You Ask How

       & I say, suicide, & you ask

how & I say, an overdose, and then

she shot herself,

& your eyes fill with what?

wonder? so I add, in the chest,

so you won't think

her face is gone, & it matters somehow

that you know this ...

                        & near the end I

eat all her percodans, to know

how far they can take me, because

they are there. So she

won't. Cut straws

stashed in her glove compartment,

& I split them open

to taste the alkaloid residue. Bitter.

Lingering. A bottle of red wine

moves each night along

as she writes, I feel too much,

again & again. Our phone now

         unlisted, our mail

kept in a box at the post office

& my mother tells me to always leave

a light on so it seems

someone's home. She finds a cop

for her next boyfriend, his hair

greasy, pushed back with his fingers.

He lets me play with his service revolver

while they kiss on the couch.

As cars fill the windows, I aim,

making the noise with my mouth,

in case it's them,

& when his back is hunched over her I aim

between his shoulder blades,

in case it's him.

    1967

I distrust the men who come at night, sitting in their cars, their

         engines running.

The living room a dark theater behind me, I watch from the curtained

         window.

My mother is twenty-seven.

She opens the car door & bends into the overhead light but before his lips

         can graze her cheek the door closes

& the light goes out.

They sit inside & fill it with smoke.

It looks creamy in the winter night, like amber, or a newfound galaxy.

I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.

A picture book teaches me how to vanish. All the children are monkeys.

They plunge into the icy sea each morning to become strong.

My mother buys a Harley & I cling to her past blurry lawns.

We walk out of Bonnie & Clyde after Gene Hackman staggers up dead.

We listen for fire bells & drive to the scene of burning houses, to stand

         close to tragedy.

The Greeks teach me to shout into the waves so people will listen.

    Trickology

            She'd screw a store-bought toy head,

a water-wiggle , onto the end of the green hose,

that made it & me go softly berserk

                twisting across the summer lawn

as if air itself were valium.

she could whisper the word burn

& I'd turn to ash

                A blackberry patch grew wild off the road

to the electric transformers.

I'd fill my hat & carry them home

                 for her to make a lattice pie. Now she tells me

that she doesn't know how to bake, that

no blackberries ever grew around us,

that I never ate pie anyway.

not ash, really,

but the bright flecks rising from a burning

                 house, the family outside,

barefoot

Copyright © 2000 Nick Flynn. All rights reserved.