Rock Harbor

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

ONE

Golden

Quarter-view, from Nauset

Interlude

Moving Target

Corral

As a Blow, from the West

The Clearing

The Deposition

TWO

By Hard Stages

The Clarity

Loose Hinge

The Threshing

The Silver Age

To Break, to Ride

Entry

THREE

Blue Shoulder

Spoken Part, for Countertenor Voice

Rock Harbor

FOUR

Trade

To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness

Cavalry

To Speak of It Now

Those Parts That Rescue Looked Like

Via Sacra

The Use of Force

FIVE

Return to the Land of the Golden Apples

Flight

Fretwork

Ravage

Canoe

Justice

Minotaur

Halo

Acknowledgments

Also by Carl Phillips

About the Author

Copyright

 

for Doug Macomber,
for Ellen Bryant Voigt,

 

and to my parents

 

Were there then no longing in time, there would be no peace in eternity.

J
OSIAH
R
OYCE

ONE

GOLDEN

There, behind the raised

and extended

wing to which

no bird

no fiend

no haloing is

attached: two bodies,

fucking. It is difficult

to see, but that much—

from the way, with great

then greater

effort, their mouths

seem half to recall or

want to

a song even older,

holier than the one they

fill with—I can

guess. The rest,

I know: that it's dream;

that, in dream,

to know a thing is to

have a gift and

not to, especially. Like

refusing to prove what

anyway all scrutable

signs point to. Stopped

trees are the least of it,

the still standing

but decidedly aslant

version of unanimous,

what looks at

first like approbation;

then—like trees,

and how a wind will

pass through. To turn

with and not

against it

no more means

the wind is with us than

the gods are. I don't

believe each gets what

each deserves.

QUARTER-VIEW, FROM NAUSET

Love, etc. Have been remembering

the part in Sophocles

where a god advises the two heroes

they should be as

twin lions, feeding—how

even the flesh of late

slaughter does not

distract them from keeping

each over the other

a guarding eye.

What part of this is love, and

what survival

is never said,

though the difference it makes is

at least that between a lily and, say,

a shield. I think of you

often, especially here,

at the edge of the world or a

part of it, anyway,

by which I mean of course

more, you will have guessed, than

the coast, just now, I

stand on. Against it,

the water dashes with

the violence of two men who,

having stripped it, now take for their

own the body of

a third man on the bad

sofa of an even worse

motel room in what eventually

is movie—one

we've seen … The way

what looks like rape

might not be. You'd like

the light here. At

times, a color you'd call anything but blue.

INTERLUDE

Briefly, an ease

akin to those parts of

the air that

allow the bird respite from

the effort of muscle

flight entails.

As I said: briefly.

It does not matter, I

understand now, my having

hoped in no way to

resemble anyone—

this, the reason

why the difficulty, I have

often been sure, with

death will be less

the dying than the having been

finally always like

everyone else; that

particular

humiliation: to admit

as much.

Very briefly, it

seems now.

In the manner of happiness

or an only-half-grounded

fear or whatever

else can at once

be both pressing and

ignorable, until—as when

the evidence has grown

embarrassing, so why

shouldn't we, let us

throw it away—until it is

like that and, soon, it

is that. We'll assume again

our new positions: myself, at

last arcing

the body

over. —Up. Into yours.

MOVING TARGET

If to be patient were less

an exercise

and more a name to be worn, say,

in the middle—

that he might wear it—

Of the linen sash to

his robe, of linen,

that his hands have

fashioned a knot such that

the knot suggests now a dragonfly in

flight from what is harmless and

not, entirely—

that he might, if at all, know this

only as when without understanding it

we know we have and have come to

expect we shall have always

upon others

an effect we do not

intend—

His face:

a face, turning. And

then a turned one.

CORRAL

for Percival Everett

Fleetingly, the mule is neither

justice nor injustice, but

another muscled

abbreviation in which

right and wrong take in

each other no apparent

interest, as if—impossible, on

purpose—to remind how

not everything is

vengeance, not everything

wants reason. The mule

intends nothing of the contrast he

makes inevitably

in a field otherwise all

horses: five of them, four

standing around and nosing

the only one whose flesh, white

entirely, lacks pattern, unless

the light counts,

the only one not standing,

lying with the particular

stillness of between when

a death has occurred

already and when we

ourselves shall have

learned of it. Until then,

that which before was

patternless and not standing

stands up, white, patterned

by the countable light,

the five horses step

into then just past a shy

gallop, the mule

among them, then beside them,

the mule falling in time behind

slightly, not like defeat—don't

think it—like, instead one who,

understanding (as a mule

cannot) in full the gravity

of the truth always that he carries

with him, can

afford to pity

honestly a glamour that

extends even to the legs, classical,

on which each horse for now outruns the mule.

AS A BLOW, FROM THE WEST

Names for the moon:

Harvest; and Blue; and

Don't Touch Me—

and Do.
I dreamed I had

made a home on the side

of a vast, live volcano,

that the rest was water,

that I was one among many of

no distinction: we but

lived there, like so many

birds that, given the chance

not to fly for once in

formation, won't take it, or

cannot, or—or—but

what of choice can a bird know?

Down the volcano's sides,

in the pose of avalanche

except frozen, and so

densely it seemed impossible

they should not strangle

one another—yet they

did not—grew all

the flowers whose names

I'd meant to master;

it was swift, the dream—so

much, still, to catch

up to—though I could not

have known that, of course,

then: isn't it only in

the bracing and first wake of

loss that we guess most cleanly

the speed with which what held us

left us? In the dream, the world

was birdless, lit, yielding, it

seemed safe, which is not to say

you weren't in it. You were, but

changed somewhat, not so much

a man of few words,

more the look of one who

—having entered willfully

some danger, having just returned

from it—chooses instead

of words his body as

the canvas across which to

wordlessly broadcast his coming

through. We lived

in a manner that—if it

didn't suggest an obliviousness

to a very real and always-there

danger—I would call heady;

it was not that. Think,

rather, of the gods: how,

if they do in fact know

everything, they must understand

also they will be eventually

overthrown by a new order,

which is at worst a loss

of power, but not of life,

as the gods know it. I was

not, that is, without

ambition: the illicit, in

particular, I would make it

my business to have studied;

and of that which is gained

easily, to want none

of it. Flowers; names

for the moon. It was

swift, the dream, the body

a wordless and stalled

avalanche that, since forgivable—

if I could—I would forgive, poor

live but flagging, dying now

volcano. And the water

around its sides receding with

a dream's swiftness: everywhere,

soon, sand and sand, a desert that,

because there was no water,

and because they missed it,

the natives had called a sea, and

to the sea had given a name:

Friendship, whose literal

translation in the country of

dream is roughly “that which

all love evolves

down to”—

Until to leave, or

try to—and have drowned

trying—becomes refrain,

the one answer each time

to whatever question:

what was the place called?

what was the house like?

what was it we did inside it?

how is it possible that it cannot be enough to have given

up to you now the dream as—for a time, remember—I did give

my truest self? why won't you take it—if a gift, if yours?

THE CLEARING

Had the light

changed, possibly—or,

differently, was that how I'd