Read an Excerpt
My Feelings
Poems
By Nick Flynn Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2015 Nick Flynn
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-905-8
CHAPTER 1
BELLY OF THE BEAST
Here again
at the edge of what was,
the river held back
by the stones it has carried,
the knife in your hand
brimming
rain. Inside this day
without beginning or end, it cannot
stand still inside you.
One day I'll leave — not you
but all this — this hunger
that pushes each wave.
AK-47
1
love lays hold of everything
2
& yes all the houses whiten in the sun just as they whiten yes in the snow & yes from above each looks like a tombstone yes just as a graveyard from above is a city yes the world is one big graveyard after all
3
a phone rings in a labyrinth
4
this house, unpainted still — when you go back, if you go back, if you can find your way, it won't, it cannot [your hand on the door] be as you remember ...
5
what need is there to build a labyrinth when [your hand on the door] the entire universe is one?
6
the amnesiac in the film last night tattooed words on his body — november. ohio. rain — to remember he was grieving his dead wife
7
this house you grew out of you grew up inside it
8
it lays hold of everything, it tears the top off a mountain, calls it volcano, pulls out the ore, lays it in fire, forges it with its hammer — it can be shaped into anything
9
inside this house a gun was cocked, uncocked, picked up, put down, aimed, lowered
10
a phone rings in a labyrinth, the dealer taps the tip of his blade to your heart [surely we have been born for a reason] — see how his mouth opens to let the words out, words we cannot see, his mouth as dark as alpha centauri
11
ALPHA: the first
CENTAURI: warrior
YOU: a small part of this unending
MOUTH: light seeps from inside you
12
the amnesiac's days are reduced to tracking down the man who killed his wife but the story is told backward & the more we see the more it seems that this is just the story he tells himself, that he cannot even remember his wife, the wires are crossed, maybe he is the one who killed her & now he is using vengeance as the engine to drive his body through time
13
& yes each of us is born with a gun on the wall yes a gun in the closet yes a gun to our heads — you cannot say it has always been this way but it has been this way for a long yes a long long time & this way it is now
14
& each face melts one into another as the gun is passed hand to melting hand, always held, always in someone's hand, the same gun in different hands or different guns in one hand, aimed or shot or raised over her head after the shot
15
& eye for eye & dust to dust the cartridges line up — each a word you must utter
16
& the path each bullet makes through the air means only one thing: I am I am I am I am I am I am
17
a phone rings in a labyrinth [this is a metaphor for the past]
18
think blood oath think suffering think revenge
think I'm sick of doing one thing & missing another
think the hard O of its mouth think at least this is something at least I can hold it think whatever abstraction you can insert here __________ a tunnel to crawl inside
19
we could melt it down [could we?] into nails or bells or railroad tracks or a tin cup or a steel toe or a spool of wire or a shovel or a leg brace or a ladder or a bedpan or scaffolding or a sewing needle or a typewriter or a hammer or a crutch or brake pads or a tiny crucifix
20
see how the mouth opens to let the moth out [they always fly into the light] — this might after all be necessary — we cannot know what change will blossom, what will become, we cannot know if each bullet is not a seed
21
to love the dead is endless tears
22
I don't know why god keeps blessing me
23
only silence is perfect
KAFKA
The cause of death seems to have been
starvation — his throat closed
& so he was no longer able to swallow. On his
deathbed he was editing The Hunger
Artist, which, perhaps ironically (perhaps
not), he'd begun working on before he was
felled. My father
will, the doctor tells me, also starve to death,
he also cannot swallow I have said no
to the feeding tube because I imagine that is
what I would want someone to say for me,
but really, how the fuck do I know? The fact
that I am the one who will pull the plug on him
& that I will pull it with one simple word
is in the realm of the unbearable, but
apparently
I will bear it. The doctor promises to make him
comfortable, which means
morphine ... nowadays this is how the plug
is pulled. Afterward,
the money he buried under that tree,
the take from all his bank jobs, all of it
will come to me, if I can just get him to draw me
a map, if I can find the tree, if I can find
his shovel. And the house, the mansion he
grew up in, soon a lawyer will pass
a key across a walnut desk, but even this
lawyer will not be able to tell me where this
mansion is. And my father's masterpieces, his
many novels, mine
now to publish — I don't have to tell anyone
I didn't write them, not a word.
THE WHEN & THE HOW
A few days into it extravagant subterranean
mystifying as we walked from the L back to
my apartment inappropriate dormant
complicated I asked about your family — you
(like me) had yet to mention any desperate distant
tethered
& as the question left my mouth I knew
confusing tongue-tied the instant before you
spoke it incomprehensible wayworn insubstantial
the moment I conjured her shadowy mystical
elemental
by uttering the word MOTHER fucked-up
painful wounded invisible unspeakable meaningless
I knew yours (like mine) had killed herself delicate & that
desperate unknown our conversations
from that moment on would be simply broken
limited backwoods
a matter of the how flimsy shameful crushing
& the when
forbidden closeted
which would matter only in so far as
all-encompassing epic god-given
it would let me know something of your struggle
phantom oceanic flickering & you
uncontainable feral misguided
something of mine
TANTALUS
From the piss on the bark, from the ash on
the leaf, from the scar
you pass on, from the cross you carve deep,
nothing here falls
you haven't let fall, air snatched from the buck
mid-leap. His flesh will pass through you
as you pass through your sons —
should have eaten them
when they were tiny.
CHAPTER 2
BEADS OF SWEAT
Blind drunk, crank drunk,
blind to suffering, blind to joy —
please
let me begin again. Even
Moses, that day he went up
that mountain
to hear how from that day on it must
be, even Moses couldn't look, not for
long, into what we call still unknowable,
still unsayable, still whirlwind, still
abyss ... Up there he heard
a voice, When I speak you will know
from where it comes
& you will turn into it. I've been
trying, wandering this earth
for five years now, wandering the way a river
tells us it's alive
by the feather on its surface that cannot stop
moving. Each night
my father points to his bandaged
wrist — he is no more than
the sounds he makes now. I know
who you are, he says, of course I know, but he
doesn't, not really — he never was
infinite, I
know that now. Ride with me
when I go to him — someone will
have to let us in, someone who knows
the code. He won't complain — there
someone always picks you up when you
fall, someone
brings you juice. One floor above is
abandoned — can we still call it heaven? A line
of starlings on a telephone wire outside
his window, their shadows so small beneath them,
as small as you & I, balanced on our own
shadows — we do not fall, no one is falling,
the tire beneath us
gyroscopic — clockwise forward, clockwise
tomorrow, clockwise
gone. Moses was offered a glimpse
of what? God's ass? Eternity?
& it blinded him forever. Who
can tell me where I will fall next, where
the thorn will enter?
AQUARIUM
Imagine
an aquarium, one fish inside, slowly circling.
Imagine two cameras set up to film this
aquarium, to film this one fish ... Is it a clown fish?
A clown fish? Sure, a clown fish. Imagine also
you are unable to see this aquarium directly, it is in
another room & you don't know where that room
is. You are in your room, watching a screen,
the clown fish swims on that screen in that faraway
aquarium — a box within a box, a glass
within a glass. Think
of the cars we used to drive, no more than two
couches on wheels — we'd drink & drive & park
& make out, we had nowhere else to be. Our girls
were named Mary & Mary — it was a Catholic town —
& we'd watch each other move over & through them
& they, moving, watched us, a dim light buried in
the ceiling far above. Sometimes I'd catch Mary's
eye, but not my Mary. It wasn't as bad as you might
imagine —
we'd share whatever pills we'd swiped from our moms'
medicine chests, we'd grind them up & snort them if
there wasn't enough
& there was never enough. Now remember that
aquarium, those cameras, that room you will never
enter — the screen is split
so it seems you are watching two fish, but it is only
one. One fish turns, the other turns at the same
moment, synchronized, as if they are talking to
each other, as if they knew — this, the scientists
assert, is happening all the time — we are in a room,
watching the day unfold, but we have no idea
how many cameras are set up. One fish swims
inside its tiny ocean — Mary smiles at Mary, not
at me. We think this world must be broken into
fragments, we think memories are dispersed
throughout the brain & that the brain itself is
dispersed. We
think we began from a bang, but the bang never
stopped. Mary watches
Mary, waiting to see what will happen — the night
has to end somewhere. Communion. Communion
is the word.
FATHER, INSECT
After her
bath, as a way to apologize for all
my imperfections, I remind my
daughter, You know, before you were
born, I was not
a father. She takes this in
silently, moving a tiny blue elephant across
the rug. If you weren't a father, she
eventually asks, then what were you —
a bug? We'd been looking at pictures
of cavemen, talking
about evolution, about where we
came from, about all those
who came before — Are they us?
she asks. I
tell her about the carbon in her
pencil, about hydrogen bonding
with oxygen, about bacteria with
only one thought in their tiny
heads — she
uses her finger to write it all out
in the air, creating each
word as I speak it. When
did want become more
than hunger, when
did need become more
than shadow? Ecclesiastes warns
about the making
of books, of which there is no end,
this chain of meaning, this
offering — the book we both will write
today into today into today.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Feelings by Nick Flynn. Copyright © 2015 Nick Flynn. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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