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.

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

About Nick Flynn Nick Flynn is the author of "The Reenactments" (W. W. Norton, 2013). He teaches at the University of Houston and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

*** The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.

(c) 2014 Nick Flynn Distributed by King Features Syndicate