Carl Phillips

Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,
...

When the Famous Black Poet speaks,
I understand

that his is the same unnervingly slow
...

First snow-I release her into it-
I know, released, she won't come back.
This is different from letting what,
...

So that each
is its own, now- each has fallen, blond stillness.
Closer, above them,
the damselflies pass as they would over water,
...

Coral-bells purpled the fallen sycamore leaves, dead, the dead
versus those who attempted death, versus those who effectively
fashioned out of such attempts a style akin to electric guitar
shimmer swelling and unswelling like starlings when they first
...

As through marble or the lining of
certain fish split open and scooped
clean, this is the blue vein
that rides, where the flesh is even
...

About what's past, Hold on when you can, I used to say,
And when you can't, let go, as if memory were one of those
mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride
turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest's edge — 
metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though
the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent
much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-
knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,
a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was
just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary
taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what's plain, snow
from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge
every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child
whom I gave some money to and told no one about,

having promised ... You must keep what you've promised
very close to your heart, that way you'll never forget
is what I've always been told. I've been told quite
a lot of things. They hover — some more unbidden than
others — in that part of the mind where mistakes and torn
wishes echo as in a room that's been newly cathedraled,
so that the echo surprises, though lately it's less the echo
itself that can still most surprise me about memory — 
it's more the time it takes, going away: a mouth opening
to say I love sex with you too it doesn't mean I wanna stop
my life for it, for example; or just a voice, mouthless,
asking Since when does the indifference of the body's
stance when we're alone, unwatched, in late light, amount

to cruelty? For the metaphysical poets, the problem
with weeping for what's been lost is that tears
wash out memory and, by extension, what we'd hoped
to remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn't
explanation, at the end of the day, what the sturdier
truths most resist? It's been my experience that
tears are useless against all the rest of it that, if I
could, I'd forget. That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I'm not done with you yet.
...

What do we do with the body, do we
burn it, do we set it in dirt or in
stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey,
oil, and then gauze and tip it onto
and trust it to a raft and to water?

What will happen to the memory of his
body, if one of us doesn't hurry now
and write it down fast? Will it be
salt or late light that it melts like?
Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap

to a pen elsewhere —how are we to
regard his effects, do we throw them
or use them away, do we say they are
relics and so treat them like relics?
Does his soiled linen count? If so,

would we be wrong then, to wash it?
There are no instructions whether it
should go to where are those with no
linen, or whether by night we should
memorially wear it ourselves, by day

reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty.
Here, on the floor behind his bed is
a bent photo—why? Were the two of
them lovers? Does it mean, where we
found it, that he forgot it or lost it

or intended a safekeeping? Should we
attempt to make contact? What if this
other man too is dead? Or alive, but
doesn't want to remember, is human?
Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget,
and can't sometimes help it and sometimes
it is all that we want? How long, in
dawns or new cocks, does that take?
What if it is rest and nothing else that

we want? Is it a findable thing, small?
In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe,
a country? Will a guide be required who
will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we
swim? What will I do now, with my hands?
...

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns.
How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow
the fox's mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had
briefly unshut itself — and the moth that's trapped there,
unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street
seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called
doubt, or that other one,
persuasion, the broken one, in three
clean pieces    ...    Well, it's morning, now. Out back, the bamboo
bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but
nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by
now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening,
seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms
of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other
out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage
than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that
the world keeps saying it does, know it, hold on tight to it, as if
the world were rumor, how every rumor
rings true, lately.
When I'm ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what
is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety
of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please
and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be
an eventual way through? There's a minor chord sparrows make
with doves that's not the usual business — it's not sad at all, any of it:
this always waiting for what I've always waited for; this not being
able to assign to what's missing some shape, a name; this body
neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    ...
...

As through marble or the lining of
certain fish split open and scooped
clean, this is the blue vein
that rides, where the flesh is even
whiter than the rest of her, the splayed
thighs mother forgets, busy struggling
for command over bones: her own,
those of the chaise longue, all
equally uncooperative, and there's
the wind, too. This is her hair, gone
from white to blue in the air.

This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark
daddy's knuckles, that do not change, ever.
Which is to say they are no more pale
in anger than at rest, or when, as
I imagine them now, they follow
the same two fingers he has always used
to make the rim of every empty blue
glass in the house sing.
Always, the same
blue-to-black sorrow
no black surface can entirely hide.

Under the night, somewhere
between the white that is nothing so much as
blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing,
I am the man neither of you remembers.
Shielding, in the half-dark,
the blue eyes I sometimes forget
I don't have. Pulling my own stoop-
shouldered kind of blues across paper.
Apparently misinformed about the rumored
stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired,
I was told look for blue.
...

The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,
something got crossed, or didn't. Who's to say, about
happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable
was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I've
learned to spare what's failing, if it can keep what's living
alive still, maybe just
awhile longer. Ghost bamboo that
the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color
of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when
I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I've always thought
gratitude's the one correct response to having been made,
however painfully, to see this life more up close. The higher
gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser
do the best they can — so a friend I somewhere along the way
lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before
passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must
surely, by now, be dead. There's a rumored
humbling effect
to loss that I bear no trace of. It's not loss that humbles me.
What used to look like memory — clouds for hours breaking,
gathering, then breaking up again — lately seems instead
like a dance, one of those slower, too complicated numbers
I never had much time for. Not knowing exactly what it's
come to is so much different from understanding that it's come
to nothing. Why is it, then, each day, they feel more the same?
...

Do not imagine you can abdicate
Auden

Prologue

If the sea could dream, and if the sea
were dreaming now, the dream
would be the usual one: Of the Flesh.
The letter written in the dream would go
something like: Forgive me—love, Blue.

*

I. The Viewing (A Chorus)

O what, then, did he look like?
He had a good body.

And how came you to know this?
His body was naked.

Say the sound of his body.
His body was quiet.

Say again—quiet?
He was sleeping.

You are sure of this? Sleeping?
Inside it, yes. Inside it.

*

II. Pavilion

Sometimes, a breeze: a canvas
flap will rise and, inside,
someone stirs; a bird? a flower?

One is thinking Should there be
thirst, I have only to reach
for the swollen bag of skin

beside me, I have only to touch
my mouth that is meant for a flower
to it, and drink.

One is for now certain he is
one of those poems that stop only;
they do not end.

One says without actually saying it
I am sometimes a book of such poems,
I am other times a flower and lovely

pressed like so among them, but
always they forget me.
I miss my name.

They are all of them heat-
weary, anxious for evening as for
some beautiful to the bone

messenger to come. They will open
again for him. His hands are good.
His message is a flower.

*

III. The Tasting (A Chorus)

O what, then, did he taste like?
He tasted of sorrow.

And how came you to know this?
My tongue still remembers.

Say the taste that is sorrow.
Game, fallen unfairly.

And yet, you still tasted?
Still, I tasted.

Did you say to him something?
I could not speak, for hunger.

*

IV. Interior

And now,
the candle blooms gorgeously away
from his hand—

and the light has made
blameless all over
the body of him (mystery,

mystery), twelvefold
shining, by grace of twelve
mirrors the moth can't stop

attending. Singly, in no order,
it flutters against, beats
the glass of each one,

as someone elsewhere
is maybe beating upon
a strange door now,

somebody knocks
and knocks at a new
country, of which

nothing is understood—
no danger occurs
to him, though

danger could be any
of the unusually wild
flowers

that, either side of the road,
spring.
When he slows, bends down and

closer, to see or
to take one—it is as if
he knows something to tell it.

*

V. The Dreaming (A Chorus)

O what, then, did it feel like?
I dreamed of an arrow.

And how came you to know him?
I dreamed he was wanting.

Say the dream of him wanting.
A swan, a wing folding.

Why do you weep now?
I remember.

Tell what else you remember.
The swan was mutilated.

*

Envoi

And I came to where was nothing but drowning
and more drowning, and saw to where the sea—
besides flesh—was, as well, littered with boats,
how each was blue but trimmed with white, to each
a name I didn't know and then, recalling,
did. And ignoring the flesh that, burning, gives
more stink than heat, I dragged what boats I could
to the shore and piled them severally in a tree-
less space, and lit a fire that didn't take
at first—the wood was wet—and then, helped by
the wind, became a blaze so high the sea
itself, along with the bodies in it, seemed
to burn. I watched as each boat fell to flame:
Vincent and Matthew and, last, what bore your name.
...

There is a difference it used to make,
seeing three swans in this versus four in that
quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its
effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-
departure; or,
about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind
of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,
something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not:
a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit
at first, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those
saints
on whom the birds once settled freely.
...

If, when studying road atlases
while taking, as you call it, your
morning dump, you shout down to
me names like Miami City, Franconia,
Cancún, as places for you to take
me to from here, can I help it if

all I can think is things that are
stupid, like he loves me he loves me
not? I don't think so. No more
than, some mornings, waking to your
hands around me, and remembering
these are the fingers, the hands I've

over and over given myself to, I can
stop myself from wondering does that
mean they're the same I'll grow
old with. Yesterday, in the café I
keep meaning to show you, I thought
this is how I'll die maybe, alone,

somewhere too far away from wherever
you are then, my heart racing from
espresso and too many cigarettes,
my head down on the table's cool
marble, and the ceiling fan turning
slowly above me, like fortune, the

part of fortune that's half-wished-
for only—it did not seem the worst
way. I thought this is another of
those things I'm always forgetting
to tell you, or don't choose to
tell you, or I tell you but only

in the same way, each morning, I
keep myself from saying too loud I
love you until the moment you flush
the toilet, then I say it, when the
rumble of water running down through
the house could mean anything: flood,

your feet descending the stairs any
moment; any moment the whole world,
all I want of the world, coming down.
...

Less the shadow
than you a stag, sudden, through it.
Less the stag breaking cover than

the antlers, with which
crowned.
Less the antlers as trees leafless,

to either side of the stag's head, than—
between them—the vision that must
mean, surely, rescue.

Less the rescue.
More, always, the ache
toward it.

When I think of death, the gleam of
the world darkening, dark, gathering me
now in, it is lately

as one more of many other nights
figured with the inevitably
black car, again the stranger's

strange room entered not for prayer
but for striking
prayer's attitude, the body

kneeling, bending, until it finds
the muscled patterns that
predictably, given strain and

release, flesh assumes.
When I think of desire,
it is in the same way that I do

God: as parable, any steep
and blue water, things that are always
there, they only wait

to be sounded.
And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps
should ask pardon.

My fears—when I have fears—
are of how long I shall be, falling,
and in my at last resting how

indistinguishable, inasmuch as they
are countless, sire,
all the unglittering other dropped stones.
...

—shored
by trees at its far ending,
as is the way in moral tales:

whether trees as trees actually,
for their shadow and what
inside of it

hides, threatens, calls to;
or as ever-wavering conscience,
cloaked now, and called Chorus;

or, between these, whatever
falls upon the rippling and measurable,
but none to measure it, thin

fabric of this stands for.
A kind of meadow, and then
trees—many, assembled, a wood

therefore. Through the wood
the worn
path, emblematic of Much

Trespass: Halt. Who goes there?
A kind of meadow, where it ends
begin trees, from whose twinning

of late light and the already underway
darkness you were expecting perhaps
the stag to step forward, to make

of its twelve-pointed antlers
the branching foreground to a backdrop
all branches;

or you wanted the usual
bird to break cover at that angle
at which wings catch entirely

what light's left,
so that for once the bird isn't miracle
at all, but the simplicity of patience

and a good hand assembling: first
the thin bones, now in careful
rows the feathers, like fretwork,

now the brush, for the laying-on
of sheen.... As is always the way,
you tell yourself, in

poems—Yes, always,
until you have gone there,
and gone there, "into the

field," vowing Only until
there's nothing more
I want—thinking it, wrongly,

a thing attainable, any real end
to wanting, and that it is close, and that
it is likely, how will you not

this time catch hold of it: flashing,
flesh at once

lit and lightless, a way
out, the one dappled way, back—
...

Other than that, all was still — a quiet
so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and
words the way to break it, they began speaking.
They spoke of many things:
sunset as a raft leaving the water in braids behind it;
detachment, the soul, obedience;
swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow;
what did they wish they could see, that they used to see;
to mean no harm, or to not especially, just now, be looking for it;
what would they wish not to see, could they stop seeing;
courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily — 
maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers
make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it,
versus having asked, and been softly turned from.
They said it would hurt, and it does.
...

No eye that sees could fail to remark you:
like any leaf the rain leaves fixed to and
flat against the barn's gray shingle. But

what leaf, this time of year, is so pale,
the pale of leaves when they've lost just
enough green to become the green that means

loss and more loss, approaching? Give up
the flesh enough times, and whatever is lost
gets forgotten: that was the thought that I

woke to, those words in my head. I rose,
I did not dress, I left no particular body
sleeping and, stepping into the hour, I saw

you, strange sign, at once transparent and
impossible to entirely see through. and how
still: the still of being unmoved, and then

the still of no longer being able to be
moved. If I think of a heart, his, as I've
found it.... If I think of, increasingly, my

own.... If I look at you now, as from above,
and see the diva when she is caught in mid-
triumph, arms half-raised, the body as if

set at last free of the green sheath that has—
how many nights?—held her, it is not
without remembering another I once saw:

like you, except that something, a bird, some
wild and necessary hunger, had gotten to it;
and like the diva, but now broken, splayed

and torn, the green torn piecemeal from her.
I remember the hands, and—how small they
seemed, bringing the small ripped thing to me.
...

Not less; only—different. Not
everything should be visible.
Wingdom:

doves. Not everything
can be. There are many parts
to the body. The light, like

I said. Gratia exempli, per
person more than one
heart. As, of hearts,

more than one kind.
As coin.
As thrust. To begin

counting is to understand
what it can mean, to
lose track. Is there nothing

not useful? Anything
left, anymore, private? Ambition,
like they said: little torch;

having meant to. Doom is
always in style somewhere
and, where it isn't, will

come back. Bird
in the bush, take me. Splendor:
nothing priceless. To believe

anything, to want anything—these,
too, have cost you. Flame,
and the beveled sword, set

inside it. This one,
this—what did you think
body was? What did you

mean when you said
not everything should
be said? The light as a tipped

cone, searching. The body
that breaks
finally, routinely faltering

before that. If a sword,
then without patience; if as
water-pearled, swift. What else

could you have thought,
when you thought
love-having known

the torch, having more than
meant to. Just watch me. Not
grand; only—distant. Weather,

and the bleachable skull,
set inside it. Locust-wind, small
through-the-yellow-sycamore

fingering wind,
Carry me,
let the prayer—valiant, up—

go. Some bright and
last thing
should.
...

Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch
water from wells in buckets, then pour it out
for those animals that, long domesticated, would
likely perish before figuring out how to get
for themselves. That dog, for example, whose
refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child,
for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What
is it about vulnerability that can make the hand
draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem
the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force,
destructive? Don't you see how you've burnt almost
all of it, all the tenderness, away, someone screams
to someone else, in public — and looking elsewhere,
we walk quickly past, as if even to have heard
that much might have put us at risk of whatever fate
questions like that
spring from. Estrangement — 
like sacrifice — begins as a word at first, soon it's
the stuff of drama, cue the follow-up tears that
attend drama, then it's pretty much the difference
between waking up to a storm and waking up
inside one. Who can say how she got there — 
in the ocean, I mean — but I once watched a horse
make her way back to land mid-hurricane: having
ridden, surfer-like, the very waves that at any moment
could have overwhelmed her in their crash to shore, she
shook herself, looked back once on the water's restlessness — 
history's always restless — and the horse stepped free.
...