Forty-Seven Minutes

Nick Flynn

1960 –

Years later I’m standing before a roomful of young writers in a high school in Texas. I’ve asked them to locate an image in a poem we’d just read—their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back & forth about the grass & a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand & asks, Does it matter? I smile—it is as if the universe balanced on those three words & we’ve landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that no, it doesn’t, not really, matter, if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But, I whisper, leaning in close, to get through the next forty-seven minutes we might have to pretend it does.

Born in 1960, Nick Flynn is the author of the poetry collections My Feelings (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf Press, 2011), Blind Huber (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Some Ether (Graywolf Press, 2000), which was the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

About Nick Flynn

Themes

Writing

About this Poem

“I was going to call this poem ‘Pretend It Matters.’ It is nearly a found poem, in that I simply transcribed an incident—whatever transformations happened, happened in the moment. The girl’s question genuinely threw me—we teetered for a moment on the edge of existential dread, that edge we avoid as we get older and closer to the actual abyss.”

—Nick Flynn

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God’s Will

Isn’t there a bird (what’s its name?)
that collects blue

things—bottle cap, rubber band,
bits of broken

cups—to make an elaborate, sparkling
blue nest on the ground. At

a meeting, a woman spoke of
her brother, who’d just

OD’d—teary,

she said she knew it was God’s
will. We all want to be held

a little higher. Bower

bird, that’s the name, it gathers
all that blue

& arranges it into a nest
to make the beloved, of course,

Nick Flynn

2019

Sleeping Beauty

When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle
& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-
year sleep, everyone around her falls as
well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.
Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold
in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten
all that. Even the fire returns to embers,
fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all
this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—
no one will miss her because they will sleep
as long as she sleeps & they will wake
when she wakes, no one having felt

Nick Flynn

2019

Killdeer

You know how it pretends 
to have a broken wing to 
lure predators away from its 
nest, how it staggers just out 
of reach . . . if, at this moment,
you’re feeling metaphorical, 
nest can be the whatever 
inside us that we think needs 
protection, the whatever that is 
small & hasn’t yet found its 
way.

Nick Flynn

2018

Poems

Forty-Seven Minutes

More by this poet

God’s Will

Sleeping Beauty

Killdeer

Poems

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Forty-Seven Minutes

More by this poet

God’s Will

Sleeping Beauty

Killdeer

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