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Cathedral of Salt

By Nick Flynn

Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedral
of salt. I keep

the entrance hidden, no one seems to notice
the hours I’m missing  ...    I’ll

bring you one night, it’s where
I go when I

hang up the phone  ...    

                                      Neither you
nor your soul is waiting for me at

the end of this, I know that, the salt
nearly clear after I

chisel out the pews, the see-through
altar, the opaque

panes of glass that depict the stations of
our cross — Here is the day

we met, here is the day we remember we
met  ...    The air down here

will kill us, some say, some wear paper
masks, some still imagine the air above the green

trees, thick with bees

building solitary nests out of petals. What’s
the name for this? Ineffable? The endless

white will blind you, some say,
but what is there to see we haven’t already

seen? Some say it’s
like poking a stick into a river — you might as well

simply write about the stick.

Or the river.

Poet Bio

Image of Nick Flynn

Poet and memoirist Nick Flynn was born in Scituate, Massachusetts, on Boston’s South Shore. Most of the poems in his first collection, Some Ether, focus on Flynn’s tumultuous family life and include a detached yet affecting look at childhood and trauma. Having written about his family in both poetry and prose, Flynn has said, “The way I write I don’t see much distinction between the two, although prose seems more suited to daylight, and poetry to night. I try to cook both down to something essential—by the end hopefully some balance between mystery and clarity remains.”

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