By Nick Flynn

Your bible tells us that the Lord knows
why every bird falls. It isn’t for lack of want—
their song is seed seed seed. A canary’s
heart beats faster than light, fill a room
with them & it will glow. I once held a bird
in my hand, I once held a man in my arms.
I once let a doctor cut her way inside me
so I could live a little longer. Each was me,
circling myself, unable to land. As if I was
an astronaut & woke one morning in deep
space to nothing but silence. Here’s me,
beaming frantic signals back to earth, come
in, Earth, come in. Each cell in our bodies
is like this astronaut, each reacts the same
way—the moment we die, the cells want to
hold on. It takes a few hours or a few days
(our hair still grows in our coffins, fingernails
long when they dig us up) to understand
(heart brain blood / stopped quiet cold).
This morning I tell my daughter we are
canaries in a coal mine, I don’t know why
I tell her this—maybe the radio was playing
Another Iceshelf Gone. Do you know what
a coal mine is? I ask. It’s a hole, she says,
where they get the coal. The miners work in
darkness, a light strapped to their foreheads,
digging into walls. A canary is a tiny light in
search of seed—why would the miners bring
that canary down into that hole? To hear it
sing, she answers.

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Nick Flynn’s most recent book is Low (Graywolf, 2023). Other recent books include: This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (Norton, 2020), and Stay: Threads, Collaborations, and Conversations (Ze Books, 2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers.