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harbor (the conversion)

Nick Flynn

1960 –

If this bowl is always empty

If it breathes if it’s lung

If a horse can rise from the ashes

Saul was a sailor on the boat to Damascus

He did not know what he was

Paul turned to a voice it rose up from the waves

It chained his boat to the darkness

A man finds ash & he makes it a man

A horse finds ash in a horse

It lifts us it holds us it breaks us again

Scatter him into the harbor

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

Oceans

About this Poem

“’Harbor (The Conversion)’ is a collaboration with Mischa Richter, a friend who I've been collaborating with for the past few years, often by writing poems in response to his photographs and films of Provincetown, which is his home and my adopted home (or one of them)—Mischa sent me his photograph, which is a still of a short film he made of a local pal (Paul Tasha) riding one of his horses in the bay, while leading another horse beside them. I combined this image with Carravagio's great painting ‘Saul's Conversion on the Road to Damascus’, which always reminds me of Paul.”
Nick Flynn

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More by this poet

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

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harbor (the conversion)

More by this poet

God’s Will

Sleeping Beauty

Killdeer

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