Had a difficult time with this one. Yeah, well, it is what it is.
***
Hospital
The nurses enter my room,
not necessarily in white
But no less crusaders,
Trying to corner a minotaur,
Pills rattle in their pockets like bones.
You haven't noticed much difference
(not that matters anyway)
Between the times you swallow
Obediently
And the times you pretend,
Hiding the pretty colors
Beneath tissue boxes in the pink plastic bin.
It's just that sometimes
You're the princess on a throne,
Your body swathed in silver,
People come and go,
Kissing your sandals, burning herbs,
Adorning your fingers with emeralds,
Your arms with torques of silver and gold.
And that sometimes
You really are the minotaur,
Ferocity growing with every needle poke,
Every sonograph, electrocardiogram,
Magnetic resonant image,
Every sunshine voice attached to cold fingers
That promises this will just take a minute.
The doctors must be somewhere,
In the VIP lounge,
Driving a fast red car with top down,
Aruba;
I never see them.
Just these nurses,
Who enter the labyrinth
Of my room, clenching their teeth
Just a little, before steeling themselves
To face a princess, a demon.
Just swallow.
24 March 2007
19 March 2007
FATHER OUTSIDE, Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn
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
& scatters. 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.
Copyright © Nick Flynn
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