It’s been awhile since I shared some of my favorite poems, so here goes. These are poems by the incredibly talented Nick Flynn from his book Some Ether (also the author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City which was turned into the movie “Being Flynn”) and Matthew Dickman from his All-American Poem book of poetry. Amazing shit, read on.
Nick Flynn (Some Ether)
FATHER OUTSIDE
A black river flows down the center
of each page
& on either side the banks
are wrapped in snow. My father is ink falling
in tiny blossoms, a bottle
wrapped in a paperbag. I want to believe
that if I get the story right
we will rise, newly formed,
that I will stand over him again
as he sleeps outside under the church halogen
only this time I will know
what to say. It is night &
it’s snowing & starlings
fill the trees above us, so many it seems
the leaves sing. I can’t see them
until they rise together at some hidden signal
& hold the shape of the tree for a moment
before scattering. I wait for his breath
to lift his blanket
so I know he’s alive, letting the story settle
into the shape of this city. Three girls in the park
begin to sing something holy, a song
with a lost room inside it
as their prayerbook comes unglued
& scatter. I’ll bend
each finger back, until the bottle
falls, until the bone snaps, save him
by destroying his hands. With the thaw
the river will rise & he will be forced
to higher ground. No one
will have to tell him. From my roof I can see
the East River, it looks blackened with oil
but it’s only the light. Even now
my father is asleep somewhere. If I followed
the river north I could still
reach him.
***poem by Nick Flynn
Now for Matthew Dickman’s poem “The Black Album” from All-American Poem
THE BLACK ALBUM
Black like my sister’s black eye an imaginary father
gave her, so now she is forever beaten
by the absence of men, her pupil,
black like a record is black.
Black like my coffee mug but not my coffee
for I drink it with cream. For I walk out
onto the beach and bless the black bottoms
of the boats, for the plankton glow
inside the black sea like white blood cells.
for music and poverty are the great regulators of the world
when white kids in Kansas are bumping Tupac
from the windows of Ford pickups, working
in the canneries, dreaming of LA: raving and mad
between the turntables. The more I listen to Jay-Z
the more I’m reminded of Led Zeppelin,
The Stones, how they begin to live
the same life. How they need each other like organs
from a greater body. And then there are the black
keys Mr. Mozart bent into sound
so the people in the castle would have something
to move them, when outside the sky was black
and so was the moor, someone walking
across it, lost in his own suffering,
but a part of everything, the bog, the moon, the man
on the moon with his black dinner jacket, his teeth
bright black and earth below with its factories
pumping like a dog’s heart pumps after its owner
drives up, opens the door, calls out its name.
Black like the buttons on your grandfather’s coat
and black like the suits we wear
when our grandfathers die. I’m telling you
it’s hard to tell the rivers apart from the hills, the super-malls
from the ma and pa’s when I feel them both
so acutely. Black like licorice used to be
and black like the lace bra Susan wore
beneath a baby-blue t-shirt
and how I would take her to the mat like a wrestler
and how she would keep her black boots on
so that now when I think of black boots I am no longer thinking
of Neo Nazis or soldiers but bedrooms and bedposts.
She had a black pair of handcuffs with feathers
so that it looked like a black bird of submission.
For she was good when bound up
by black leather belts, for what we did
we did in the black voice box of evening
and in the morning the light came in
to touch her where she slept, drooling on the pillow.
David wrote “I don’t know,
now, if any of us get out of this.”
And I’m not sure any of us would want to,
the world coming together, crashing
around us, while we drive through the forests of Vermont,
listening to The Black Album, blasting it,
and the black bear that leaps from the road onto the tree
like a heavy black star, so that later
I would think of blackberries growing off
the freeway, the way you feel when you’re moving
along like a train running, furious, on all this black coal.
**by Matthew Dickman
Difficult Degrees 