The newly dead hung on to the ceiling last night
like moths, wanting to tell us what they hadn’t
found words for yet, their bodies still
warm on their mattresses below—they did not look
comfortable, passing themselves on the way
out . . . . Only mystery allows us
to live—Lorca wrote this on the back of one of his many
drawings of a sailor, or of many sailors. Only
mystery & yet or so
I pull myself back again to a place wherein I can com-
prehend, if only a glimmer, the moment my mother
will press a bullet into the chamber of her .38—
think of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation—nothing has happened,
not yet, Mary’s back is to the Angel, his hand
hovers over her shoulder, not touching her, not
yet. It’s still not too late to turn back—a Sunday morning,
we can hear the ocean, we can smell it, if we could get up
we could even see it. Junkies
can go to a clinic in downtown Vancouver now to shoot up
in safety—We can help them find
the vein, the pretty nurse says,
but we cannot depress the plunger . . . As I write this a Boeing 777
along with all two hundred & thirty-nine souls onboard
vanishes from the sky—
no distress call, no black box, no wreckage. By the time you
read this we will all know what happened (wormhole?
drunk pilot?) but right now it is simply
gone. Let’s look again at the Annunciation, let’s think of
the angel as a pretty nurse, let’s think of her wings as
possibility, her silence
as a syringe. Let’s put my mother in that airplane now, let’s
let her circle forever, let’s imagine she too is unable to
land. She glances out the window, sometimes
at the tops of the clouds, sometimes at someone’s sad house
below. I know you’re still in there, she whispers, raising one
finger. Poke a hole through the heavy curtains, she
mouths—you’ll see they are not even real.
Copyright © 2015 by Nick Flynn. Used with permission of the author.