Rock Harbor (5 page)

I have held faces lovelier—lovelier, or

as fair.

            They make sense

eventually. Your own begins to:

fervor of a man

cornered; unuseful tenderness with which,

to the wound it won't survive, the animal

puts its tongue.

HALO

In the dream, as if to remind

himself of his own power—that he

does have some—the gelding

whinnies once,

once more, at

nothing passing.

If this were song, I'd call it
Someone

Waving from Across the Water

at Someone Else

Not Waving Back,

but it is dream. You, speaking; and I

distracted as usual

from the words, this time by

how you speak them;

the way tuberoses open,

or new leafage—

slow, instinctive; sexual

vaguely.

There is little I've not done for you.

There are questions.

There are answers I do not give.

Between the sometimes terrible

(because leaving us always) fact

of the body to which we're

each, each moment, eroded

down—between our bodies

and the pattern the light,

dreamlight, is making on them,

the effect is one of trade routes

long since confused by time, war,

a forgetfulness, or

because here, and here, as from

much handling, the map

especially has gone soft:

wind as a face gone red with blowing,

oceans whose end is broken stitchery—

swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,

shimmer-and-coil, invitation … You know

the kind of map I mean. Countries as

distant as they are believable,

than which—to find,

to cross—I am not

more difficult.
Here I am,
I say,

wanting to help,

Over here.
And you turn. And

on its axis—swift,

inexorable as luck—the dream, turning,

with you …

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which the poems in this volume first appeared:

Boston Review:
“The Deposition”

Callaloo:
“Golden,” “Quarter-view, from Nauset,” “Interlude,” “Moving Target,” “The Clearing”

Daedalus:
“The Use of Force”

Field:
“Canoe”

Green Mountains Review:
“Entry,” “Those Parts That Rescue Looked Like”

The Harvard Advocate:
“To Speak of It Now”

Indiana Review:
“The Silver Age,” “Minotaur”

The Kenyon Review:
“As a Blow, from the West”

Kestrel:
“Loose Hinge”

LIT:
“Blue Shoulder,” “Cavalry”

Michigan Quarterly Review:
“Rock Harbor,” “Return to the Land of the Golden Apples”

Mid-American Review:
“The Threshing,” “To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness”

New England Review:
“The Clarity,” “Justice”

The New Republic:
“Flight”

Parnassus: Poetry in Review:
“To Break, to Ride,” “Trade,” “Via Sacra”

The Progressive:
“Corral”

Seneca Review:
“Ravage,” “Halo”

The Threepenny Review:
“Fretwork”

Tikkun:
“By Hard Stages”

“The Clearing” also appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2001
(Robert Hass and David Lehman, editors), Scribner, 2001.

“Fretwork” also appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2002
(Robert Creeley and David Lehman, editors), Scribner, 2002.

“Moving Target” also appeared in the Signature Series of the Catskills Poetry Workshop, Catskills Ltd. Edition, 2000.

“Spoken Part, for Countertenor Voice” appeared as a Dia Foundation Broadside, 2000.

“To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness” also appeared in
Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses
(Bill Henderson, editor), Pushcart Press, 2002.

The epigraph comes from Royce's
The World and the Individual.
All thanks to my friend and colleague Naomi Lebowitz, for leading me there.

ALSO BY CARL PHILLIPS

In the Blood

Cortège

From the Devotions

Pastoral

The Tether

CARL PHILLIPS

Rock Harbor

CARL PHILLIPS
is the author of six books of poems, including
The Tether
(FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2002, and
From the Devotions,
which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2001, he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2002 by Carl Phillips

All rights reserved

Published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 2003

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

Paperback
ISBN
0-374-52885-3

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466880085

First eBook edition: August 2014