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My brother builds a wall of airplane glue around his bed, the fumes become

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Some Ether

Some Ether

Nick Flynn

Graywolf Press

Copyright

Copyright © 2000 by Nick Flynn

Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Dayton’s, Mervyn’s, and Target stores through the Dayton Hudson Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Additional funding for this title was provided by the Jerome Foundation.

Special funding for this title was provided by a grant from the Greenwall Fund of The Academy of American Poets.

Published by Graywolf Press

250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-303-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-934-8

8  10  12  14  15  13  11  9  7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-067244

Cover design by Scott Sorenson

Cover photograph by Marian Roth

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals and anthologies where certain of these poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:

ARK/angel Review: “Sudden,” “Some Ether,” “And Then, And Then,” “Curse”

The Marlboro Review: “God Forgotten”

Mudfish: “Angelization”

The Nation: “Bag of Mice,” “Cartoon Physics, part 1”

New England Review: “Flashback”

Painted Bride Quarterly: “Ago,” “Trickology,” “Residue”

The Paris Review: “Fragment (found inside my mother)”

Passages North: “Flood,” “Worthless”

Pierogi Press: “Salt,” “My Mother Contemplating Her Gun”

Ploughshares: “You Ask How,” “Emptying Town”

Provincetown Arts: “Father Outside”

Shankpainter: “The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands,” “Prayer,” “Elsewhere, Mon Amour,” “The cellar a machine whirring through the night,” “Splenectomy,” “Twenty-Pound Stone,” “The Robot Moves!”

The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review: “1967”

Talula: “No Map”

Third Coast: “Wild with Dandelions & Roses,” “Seven Fragments (found inside my father)”

“Sudden” also appeared in What Have You Lost?, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Greenwillow Books, 1999.

“Peach” appeared in Cape Discovery: The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Anthology, edited by Bruce Smith and Catherine Gammon, published by Sheep Meadow Press, 1994.

“Bag of Mice,” “Emptying Town,” “Cartoon Physics, part 1,” and “Cartoon Physics, part 2” also appeared in The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, edited by Michael Collier, published by the University Press of New England, 2000.

“Fragment (found inside my mother),” “God Forgotten,” “Bag of Mice,” and “Emptying Town” also appeared in American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Gerald Costanzo and Jim Daniels, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000.

Many friends and teachers have read all or parts of this book in manuscript form and contributed vital encouragements, inspiration, and comments. It wouldn’t exist without you—thanks go out daily.

Specific thanks to Rodney Phillips, Caroline Crumpacker, Paul Lentz, Rebecca Wolff, Robert Danburg, Julie Carr, Franc Graham, John Mattson, Ray Nolin, and Jacqueline Woodson—for being here, always. And to Fred Marchant—for deep understanding.

For material support and time: the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Millay Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the PEN American Center, and, of course, everyone at Graywolf.

The memory of Jody Draper, Alice Draper, Richard Booton, and Ivan Wendell Hubbard infuses this book.

Finally, to Frances Richard—love that keeps opening.

Dedication

for Tad Flynn

I

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 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

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.

II

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.

Flood

The earth smells like whatever drifts past—

a moment ago, black apples, now

sheep, legs turned to the sky, as if the world

had been turned over & it was me

hanging underwater. I’ve moved upstairs. Next it’ll be

the attic, then out

onto the roof. In grade school I heard

clouds could weigh three tons & I wondered

why they didn’t all just fall to the ground. Lately

I study rain, each drop shaped

like a comet, ten million of them, as if a galaxy

had exploded above us. The water now

waits to re-enter heaven, waits in my

kitchen, fattening phonebooks, bleeding

family photographs. Yesterday

the river broke its banks

& flooded the cemetery, washing away

topsoil, collapsing tombstones. It lifted

the caskets from their graves,

left someone’s mother in a tree, delivered a stillborn

to the wrong family. Ten strangers

floated into the parking lot & lined their caskets up

as though anxious for the ruined market

to open. I filled sandbags, bought

another pump, read a manual on lifesaving—the trick:

hang lifelessly & breathe only air.

Flashback

Erupting is simply what volcanoes do.

—Heinz Pagels

I imagine I just barely escaped, repeat,

barely… escaped

but, more & more lately, it isn’t clear

from what. The house, as

unlikely as it seems,

still stands, though no one inside

remembers me. In my memory it is always raining,

& when it rains

the water rises in the crawlspace

& threatens the furnace

which cost eighteen hundred dollars

new. The plumber’s name penciled on

the unpainted plaster, the phone

screwed to the wall, John

smashes it up in another flashback,

but is this his flashback now

or mine? Last summer I tracked him down

to the woods upstate. He didn’t remember

the years he lived with us, not

clearly. He asked, did you people even know

I’d been in Vietnam? In my flashback

he shoots out all the windows, splinters

a chair, cuts his hand deep

putting it through a cabinet door.

By morning I find blood pooled on the yellow

linoleum. It is quiet. He is

gone. In my version

it’s raining that morning, the rain

drops a blanket on the house, I poke a finger

through soggy wool, press my

mouth to the holes to breathe. Where

is my mother in all this? Two lights

embedded in the kitchen ceiling—one

or the other always burned-

out. She stands at the sink, looking out

at the rain, the dead bulb

pushing down on her shoulder. Even if I could ask

she might not remember it this way. I don’t

think about him at all anymore, my brother

claims, while John busts up the house

for the umpteenth time, & behind locked doors

we hunker down, yelling, Leave.

No Map

Ghost stars convincingly stutter,

you can stare all night

& they might not even exist. As we line up

the teacher asks, Is there a sign that says

touch the wall? Then don’t

touch the wall. On the radio a man sings, I’m

gonna make you love me,

but he doesn’t say how. We scour

pornography, study bodies like maps

of lost & distant countries. We all have

nightmares—a man’s voice

getting closer, a woman hovering

just out of reach. Mary

smears lipstick on my ears

as I search for her clitoris, having read

that if I apply the perfect balance

of thumb & forefinger

she will love me forever. In school

they give a test: Please _____ me

a napkin, _____ the wagons up the hill. We learn

that all the salmon are becoming

confused, that the center of the earth is a planet

spinning within a planet, & the universe

is smaller than expected,

yet filled with more

than we ever imagined. Please

sing me a napkin, plant the wagons

up the hill.

Wild with Dandelions & Roses

Like sands through the hourglass, the tv

intones, every weekday at 3,

bending my grandmother into her stories, trapping me

on the swirling rag carpet

as I drive my matchbox camaro

to the stitched center & back. Saturdays

Tarzan fills the room & I learn

about quicksand, how the less you struggle

the slower you sink.

Here is her hallway, the lightswitch buried

under years of wallpaper, so many layers

the corners are rounded, the walls springy,

like the earth beneath an ancient cedar. Her yard is wild

with dandelions & roses, her fingers gnarled

from turning over flowerbeds, from crushing

Japanese beetles. She gives me clorox

to pour on anthills

& popsicles in the summer, her sidedoor

unlocked for me at night. She gives

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