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Overview
Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
Some Ether is 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 Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979348 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 104 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
NICK FLYNN's work—which includes Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Memoir, and the poetry collections Blind Huber and Some Ether—has been translated into thirteen languages.
Read an Excerpt
Some Ether
By Nick Flynn
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2000 Nick FlynnAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-934-8
CHAPTER 1
The Visible Woman
It is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.
— D.W. Winnicott
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 O 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 e
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
The Visible Woman
In the dark museum we see the pump of her heart, brightening with each
beat, her pulse big through the speakers. We listen
until the seats fill, until the floodlights come on
& she speaks, Welcome, this is my body, spinning
slowly, her palms upturned
My brother builds a wall of airplane glue around his bed, the fumes become
dreams as they harden, our mother reaches a cool
washcloth to his fever, the sheet sticks to his body,
like the canvas that forms a balsa plane
Welcome, she says, this is my body, says circulation &
her veins light up like sick rivers, says skin is a door, her hair
molded plastic, her lungs filling blue, her eggs lined up
& waiting, even her bones glow, the marrow white fire,
like a flashlight held in my mouth
When she died we knelt at the coffin, my brother reached a hand out to her
cheek, she's not even real
And Then, And Then
As a kid I ruled, God Almighty, but it got
so tired. I delivered newspapers, had a route.
If it snowed my mother would drive, I'd read her the headlines
as we idled between houses.
I read about a man who ate an entire car, bolt-by-bolt,
& another who ate acid
& freaked, landing in jail
where he gouged his own eyes out. I thought
he looked like Jesus, but a lot of people
looked like Jesus then.
Patty Hearst was robbing that bank, & Nixon
was led away by the Army. Sometimes
before I'd make it back to the car she would start to drive
slowly away, and I'd have to jump in on the run, as if I were
a cowboy, or a gangster. I told her about Superman,
how he'd plough through the crust of the earth for a handful of coal
& compress it to a diamond between his palms,
his blue muscles straining.
I was saving money to buy her a new car.
Now it's a story I tell backwards.
Across from me on the train a man is having a dialogue with himself,
saying, I got money, you think I don't got money, shit,
I'm waking up tomorrow morning, going to work, I got
money, I can leave anytime, I got a hundred places to go
My Mother Contemplating Her Gun
One boyfriend said to keep the bullets
locked in a different room.
Another urged
clean it
or it could explode. Larry
thought I should keep it loaded
under my bed,
you never know.
I bought it
when I didn't feel safe. The barrel
is oily,
reflective, the steel
pure, pulled from a hole
in West Virginia. It
could have been cast into anything, nails
along the carpenter's lip, the ladder
to balance the train. Look at this, one
bullet,
how almost nothing it is —
saltpeter sulphur lead Hell
burns sulphur, a smell like this.
safety & hammer, barrel & grip
I don't know what I believe.
I remember the woods behind my father's house
horses beside the quarry
stolen cars lost in the deepest wells,
the water below
an ink waiting to fill me.
Outside a towel hangs from a cold line
a sheet of iron in the sky
roses painted on it, blue roses.
Tomorrow it will still be there.
Ago
I don't even know
how a telephone works, how your voice reached
all the way from Iron River, fed
across wires or satellites, transformed
& returned. I don't understand
the patience this takes, or anything
about the light-years between stars.
An hour ago
you cupped your hands in the tub & raised them up,
an offering of steam. Now
we're driving 66 mph
& one maple is coming up fast, on fire. I begin,
it's like those fireworks over
the East River, but it's not enough
to say this. By the time I find the words
it will already be past, rushing away as if falling
into a grave, drained
of electricity, the world between something is happening
& something happened. Think of an astronaut, big silver hands
& gravity boots, the effort spent
to keep from flying off into space. Think of
the first time your grandparents listened
to a phonograph, the needle falling to black
vinyl, a song without a body. Think of the names
you see on a map, think of these towns & rivers
before they were named, when "Liberty" & "New Hope"
were a large rock, a stand of birches. It's what
I'm afraid of, the speed with which everything
is replaced, these trees, your smile, my mother
turning her back to me before work,
asking over her shoulder,
how does this look?
Radio Thin Air
Keep the radio on softly
so it sounds like two people in the next
room, maybe
your parents, speaking calmly about something
important — a lack
of cash, the broken
cellar pump. Marconi believed
we are wrapped in voices, that waves
never die, merely space themselves
farther & farther apart,
passing through the ether he imagined
floating the planets. But wander
into the kitchen & no one
will be there, the tiny red eye of the radio, songs
that crawl through walls,
voices pulled from air. Marconi
wanted to locate the last song
the band on the deck of the Titanic played,
what Jesus said
on the cross, he kept dialing
the frequency, staring across the Atlantic,
his ear to the water,
there, can you hear it?
Sudden
If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper
might have used the word massive,
as if a mountain range had opened
inside her, but instead
it used the word suddenly, a light coming on
in an empty room. The telephone
fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating
something happened, something awful
a sunday, dusky. If it had been
terminal, we could have cradled her
as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth,
said good-bye. But it was sudden,
how overnight we could be orphaned
& the world become a bell we'd crawl inside
& the ringing all we'd eat.
Emptying Town
— after Provincetown
Each fall this town empties, leaving me
drained, standing on the dock, waving bye-
bye, the white handkerchief
stuck in my throat. You know the way Jesus
rips open his shirt
to show us his heart, all flaming & thorny,
the way he points to it. I'm afraid
the way I miss you
will be this obvious. I have
a friend who everyone warns me
is dangerous, he hides
bloody images of Jesus around my house
for me to find when I come home — Jesus
behind the cupboard door, Jesus tucked
into the mirror. He wants to save me
but we disagree from what. My version of hell
is someone ripping open his
shirt & saying,
look what I did for you.
Oceanic
The ocean is always looking
for a way into your boat.
— The U.S. Coast Guard, on lifesaving
Angelization
When a plane goes down we search the wreckage
for the black box, where the pilot's voice
lies: any hint
he saw the mountain rise up, if the gauges
functioned. The word for the process
by which any technology disembodies us
is angelization: a telephone can do it, computers
dense with blue chatter,
a television burning with the dead
who refuse to stay dead. The day Richard left
a woman sat in the waiting room, balancing
a goldfish on her knee
in a knotted plastic bag. The woman
seemed hypnotized by reruns, the goldfish
circled, always surprised by
the bag, as if expecting the water
to simply go on & on. Richard
was trying to speak — outside
a river flowed, lined with trees
beginning to bud, reflecting
in each of his eyes. I said,
squeeze my hand if you understand, but his hand
was quiet. Imagine him as a pilot, orbiting
forever, refueling midair. How could we know
the plane would fall, his body
dematerialize, fade. First we see
his hand, then the bones in his hand, then
the wheel behind the bones — an answering
machine in an empty room that whispers,
I'm not here right now ...
Cartoon Physics, part 1
Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down — earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump
you will be saved. A child
places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows
the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn
that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall
until he notices his mistake.
Memento Mori
A virus threads its way through us, rides our blood
like a subway, erasing everything. But it's
alright, I don't want to remember floorplans or
thresholds anyway, the light
finding the airspace around my mother's door,
the black air filling her lungs
until all inside her
hangs darkly. I left the attic
unlatched, shimmied up the gutterpipe, I knew
I'd never wake her, no matter how hard I
knocked.
* * *
She opened herself like a time-lapsed rose. I thought
our bodies were mostly water
but there was so much blood. I rinsed the rags
in the sink & she whirlpooled
away, below my feet, filling sewers,
so much flowing from that moment, that
Atlantic.
* * *
All the payphones hang stuffed with quarters,
the map has been folded too many times.
I'm sick of God & his teaspoons. I don't want
to remember her
reaching up for a kiss, or the television
pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom.
I'd stare at the dust lit up by the sun,
it formed fallen pillars
connecting the windows to the floor & I knew
they were all that kept the walls
from collapse.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Some Ether by Nick Flynn. Copyright © 2000 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.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
I The Visible Woman,Bag of Mice,
Fragment (found inside my mother),
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands,
You Ask How,
1967,
Trickology,
The Visible Woman,
And Then, And Then,
My Mother Contemplating Her Gun,
Ago,
Radio Thin Air,
Sudden,
Emptying Town,
II Oceanic,
Angelization,
Cartoon Physics, part 1,
Memento Mori,
Flood,
Flashback,
No Map,
Wild with Dandelions & Roses,
Other Meaning,
The Robot Moves!,
How Do You Know You're Missing Anything?,
III Devil Theory,
Seven Fragments (found inside my father),
Glass Slipper,
Father Outside,
Salt,
Sunday,
Two More Fragments,
Curse,
Man dancing with a paper cup,
Prayer,
Stylite (fragment #10),
Elsewhere, Mon Amour,
IV Ether,
Cartoon Physics, part 2,
The cellar a machine whirring through the night,
Her Smoke (her trick),
Splenectomy,
Five Hundred Years,
Worthless,
Soft Radio,
Residue,
Peach,
You moved me through each room,
Fugue,
Twenty-Pound Stone,
Some Ether,
God Forgotten,
Notes,