Authors: Carl Phillips
seen it
             always, and not
looking? Was I meant for
a vessel? Did I only
believe so and,
so, for a time, was it true but
only in that space which belief makes
for its own wanting?
What am I going to
do with you
                     âWho just
said that?
Whose the bodyâwhereâthat voice
belongs to?
                   Might I turn,
toward it, whinny
into it?
             My life
             a water,
             or a cure for
             that which no water
             can cure?
             His chest
             a forest, or a lush
             failureâ
Even now, shall I choose? Do I
get to?
Dearest-once-to-me
                         Â
Dearest-still-to-me
Have I chosen
already,
                or is choice a thing
hovering yet, an
intention therefore, from
which, though
late, could I hurry back?
What am I going to do with youâ
or
how?
Whom for?
                    If stay my handâwhere
            rest it?
THE DEPOSITION
Whether it more was like
the ocean,
or more
those plates in the earth that
shift abruptly according to
laws that, even if I
give to them here
no name, apply
nevertheless outside, in
spite ofâ
I forget,
as so many somewhere always have
just said. Exaggeration,
to say I never thought
I'd lie among them; more exactly: I
had not hoped to. How
brief, comparatively
at least, that
feathered phaseâ
less Roman,
more Greek, more
birch than
ash, none of shame's
nobility attached, butâ
worseâthe embarrassing
thud of blunder, to
ever have laid
the blue-to-black,
black,
then blue
familiar of self full-length
and down, ringside, as if there'd been
a ring, or as if by
long traveling at last done
in, as who would
not be? I
had not guessed it.
As when to find a stone
is to find revealed
no truth unless the truth
of stones, which
is to say the fact of
themselves only. Or
as when the song
of wanting is understood as
not at all the song of
being wanted,
not like thirst,
not like hunger,
not the disappointment
of only the one leaf gone
vermilion inside of
the tree's saffron majority,
not a godlessness in
the wake of a habit of prayer, neither
that sort of wind, nor a tunnel, or through one, it
was not like that.
TWO
BY HARD STAGES
All the gloriesâ
ribbed, and
separate,
                   collective
sway-in-the-wind.
Shut them.
                    To have wanted
more, where has that
carried me,
                    if what
so much matters
now can be proven
later to all
along have been doomed
not to?
      â¢
            The governing
drift was from
sensation to
                      distraction to
irrelevance: “they came
to nothing,” it says here,
“en route
settling for things like
heat falling mostly
against, light mainly
falling, between them
a bush or
                    a skull
shimmering like another
example of absence of
willâwith
heat only,
shiveringâ”
      â¢
                      Do I make
a difference? or
What is it
                   so persuades, I
must make one?
The text breaks like a road
forking where none
warned of â¦
Look at yourself,
Look at you.
                      Have I not
looked thereâ
possibility for
âinto it?
                 How small,
      â¢
without effort almost,
can be the leap from
it-is-findable to
we-have-found-it.
Though not water,
not the flash, even,
as if off of that which
could be water, could
also not beâ
                           To have
called it water. “They
crossed themselves,
they gave
utterly themselves over
to what
               wasn't there,
that it might
save, or drown them⦔
THE CLARITY
No dreamâbut as
if so, moving at first
with the force of
idea purely; and
then of a man convinced
he has justified
brilliantly himself to
himself; and then
of the yearling that,
haltered at
last, remains
still to be gentled, to be
broken-to-ride, although
no yearling, not a horse
ever, and not dream.
I turned.
I could see,
across the room,
heaped there like fouled
linen like memory like
detritus stepped
away from, the truth of
âof myself: glintless,
yes, but no
more so for my having (how
long?) disavowed it.
Suggestive of sorrow,
or the cool irreversibility that
attaches commonly to
larger mistakes
of judgmentâso did it
lie there: undiminished.
I take it, in the darkness, to my face.
LOOSE HINGE
Of the body: most,
its resilience, have you
not loved that, itsâits
endingness,
that too?
And the unwitting
prayer getting made
between them,
as when we beat at
what is closed,
closed against us, and call
the beating, in time,
song. To have been
among the hands
for which the stone lets go
its sword,
or the tree its gold
crepitating
bough,
what must that
feel like? With what speed
does the hero grow
used toânecessarilyâ
the world's surrender
untilâhow
elseâhow call it
strange, how
not inevitable? Heroes,
in this way at least, resembling
the damned
who are damned
as traitors, some
singing
We could not
help it,
others
Fate,
Circumstance,
X
made me
âas if
betrayal required more than
one party, which it
does not.
Admit it: you gave
yourself away. We are
exactly what
we are, as you
suspected, andâ
like thatâthe world
obliging with its fair
examples: rain and,
under it, the yard
an overnight field
of mushrooms,
the wet of them, the yellow-
white of, the
nothing-at-all, outside
themselves, they
stood for. You've been
a seeming
exception only. Hot;
relentless. Yourself the rule.
THE THRESHING
A sweetness, sayâ
and coming, on me. Or, in
almost-squares,
light dismissible at
first as that which,
surelyâ Did I
dream that?
Between
what by now lies far
behind, and what
ahead still, gets
forged a life that,
whether or not I can
recall having
called it mine own
âor say so
nowâwill have been
the case, notwithstanding:
as when a smaller
fate, this time, fumbles
clear of one larger, flies
free, how the usual
questionsâis this
nature? design?
whose?â
alter none of the
particulars of escape,
of the being foiled.
If the world is
godless, then
an absence I am
always with, and
it with me. Or
else the world is
stitched with gods and
unavoidably I am
with them,
they with me.
To be reduced to
nothing, literally, but a life
to lose; to surrender
that, also, to those
whispering
Yes, yes,
that also
â Isn't this
the idea? To give, even
full well knowing that
they might take it,
they might not, their
gazeâas if by some
city more new
and glittering than
the last one graced
briefly then lifted
out ofâtheir gaze
distracted.
Point at which
who seeks, with the
swerveless patience that
hunger, for a time,
affords, shall find
his targetâstilling,
stopped. No room
for wanting. âWas this
not the idea?
The hands: as if only
made for thisâ
Should the eyes not
be, already,
shut,
then you must shut them.
THE SILVER AGE
Naturally, the lawn fills
in, where you
repaired it.
Of the two
trees left,
one dying,
the parts of the tree
across which disease gets
laid, like a map,
out,
and the other parts,
putting forth still their
late, bright,
October budsâberriesâ
which one?
                    What's to
stay for, in a slow
drama whose end we know
already?
                 This morning,
it seems impossible,
that question, to have ever
asked it,
that I did not
always recognize
a pleasureâ
baroque,
acquiredâfindable
only inside the particular
chord that an ever-building body
of evidence
makes, finally,
with the very fact it can't
help but
lead to.
               After which, though
a bit surprised where,
before, was hope, or
doubt,
We suspected
as much,
we say.
We knew
all along
what the light would
be likeâ
a grazing
weightlessness; what
leaves, in turn;
sprawl of the sleeper's
legs
his chest
his face
TO BREAK, TO RIDE
That, nightly,
some blooms fold,
some open; how
the opossum at the same
hour forages the same swatch
of yard; and the moth,
a shadow, all
over again navigates
more shadowâ
There's a knowing born
of conquering;
conscious at first,
or never, reflexive finally,
a mastery of pattern,
how a thing changesâ
light,
a difference in it,
an absence ofâ
the better to mark and
react in turn to
when, of a sudden, pattern
stops: where
is danger?
what is safe? This
kind of knowing, it is like
a ladder. It is
scales, in music:
though I believe that the earth
rotates, what I
notice more is
the moon appearing,
what I'd rather
remember is another
storyâconcerns a boat,
routine, the bearing
away of one
brightness, the fact
of others,
smaller, more of. How
still, beside me. The difference
between us the same as
that between a garden
shaped by patience,
attention,
plan,
and a field to which
an unexpected heat in late
October brings
now the worker bees
confused, instinctive,
back. If a sadness
to it, then
a sadness, one that
no more lets me go than
I let
it
go. It is waste,
to worry. We shall never
be more close than we are now.
ENTRY
As if an arkâ
or,
like one, how slow â¦
How it does not seem
to leave the shore or
want to so much asâmore,
whatever it must, already, it is
letting go.
On the water, a stillness that
should not be