Quote:
Flynn is committed to facing hard realities and trying to explain what it is like to bear them, and he’s a good builder of metaphors that help us understand. In “Cathedral of Salt,” the speaker describes his work (a bit like the narrator of Kafka’s short story “The Burrow”) on a secret cathedral: “Beneath all this I’m carving a cathedral/of salt. I keep/the entrance hidden, no one seems to notice/the hours I’m missing . . .” A cathedral is a spiring structure, meant to be seen for miles around, to last through the ages. Flynn’s “Cathedral of Salt” on the other hand is both under everything visible and ephemeral—made of salt. It is a lonely place, meant for one. The narrator knows all this, but keeps working on it: Neither you
nor your soul is waiting for me at
the end of this, I know that now, the salt
nearly clear after I
chisel out the pews, the see-through
altar, the opaque
panes of glass that depict the stations of
our cross—Here is the day
we met, here is the day we remember we
met . . . The air down here
will kill us, some say, some wear paper
masks, some still imagine the air above the green
trees, thick with bees
building solitary nests out of petals. What’s
the name for that? Ineffable? The endless
white will blind you, some say . . .
These lines are sharply drawn, with enjambments that push us to keep reading. I can’t help but see “Cathedral of Salt” as reflecting Flynn’s ambivalence about poems: their artifice, their thin and papery beauty, how they can “kill” the particulars of real stories or at least disguise them, sometimes reverting to pastoral imaginings, creating “masks” of paper that hide the reality of “all this.” But the act of making is meaningful to the narrator; it is a way to depict “the stations of/our cross,” to make a fleeting monument to human feeling.
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