confused with sex … Above us, what sang like water was
just the wash of trees, now moving, now at rest in a wind’s
disruption. A slight rustling beneath us, as of fruit unfalling
from the ground it fell to, each time we’d lift our oars
free of the waves, and steady them there, respite, shadows
in a mirror, bruises on the larger bruise of the sea’s black face.
MONOMOY
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.
IF YOU WILL, I WILL
To each his own urgency. I’ve spent this morning clearing
best as I can the strange pornography that last night’s
storms made of the trees in the yard: oak and pear branches
everywhere; of the saplings, one broken, the other in need
of retying—its roots meanwhile, where the topsoil’s gotten
washed away, left exposed to a spring that, not yet done settling
in, can’t be trusted. I like a wreckage I can manage myself,
the chance it offers for that particular version of power
that comes from winnowing cleanly the lost from the still
salvageable, not erasing disorder exactly, but returning
order to a fair footing, at least, beside a wilderness I wouldn’t
live without. I’ve got this friend—I guess you could call him that—
who worries I’ll never stop courting recklessness—his
word for it—as a way of compensating for or maybe making
room, where there should
be no room, for something torn
inside. Who can say if that’s right? After a life of no signs
of it, he’s found faith, and wants to know if I’m ready, finally,
to—as, again, he puts it—put my hand in the Lord’s. For
the ancient Greeks—though others, too, must have thought this—
the gods were compelled most by rhythm, that’s why ritual
was so important, the patterning of it, rhythm’s lost
without pattern. I don’t doubt that the gods—if that’s
what you want to call whatever happens in this world, or
doesn’t, or not as you hoped, or hoped for once it wouldn’t—
turning from one thing toward something else, but if what
comes in return is the gods’ briefly full attention, though
magisterial at first, maybe—well, good luck dealing
with that. As when
intimacy seems nothing more, anymore, than
a form of letting what’s been simple enough become difficult,
because now less far. Or as when, looking into a mirror,
I’ve looked closer still, and seen the rest that I’d missed earlier:
fierce regret, with its flames for fingers, hope as the not-so-
dark holdover from the dark before … Despite our differences,
we agree about most things, my friend and I, or let’s say it
gets harder for me, as the years go by, to know for sure
he’s wrong. It’s like a game between us. He says my
moods are like the images any burst of starlings makes
against an open sky, before flying away. I say either no one’s
listening, this late, or else anyone is. You’ve changed, he says,
getting slowly dressed again. You don’t know me, I say, I say back.
WILD IS THE WIND
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.
THE SEA, THE FOREST
Like an argument against keeping the more
unshakable varieties of woundedness inside, where
such things maybe best belong, he opened his eyes
in the dark. Did you hear that, he asked … I became,
all over again, briefly silver, as in what the leaves
ded like waves
at first, then like mistakes when, having gathered
momentum, they crash wave-like against the shore of
everything that a life has stood for. —What, I said.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With many thanks to the editors of the following journals, wherein these poems first appeared, sometimes in different form:
Academy of American Poets/Poem-a-Day: “Swimming,” “The Way One Animal Trusts Another”
Bear Review: “If You Will, I Will”
Callaloo: “Gently, Though, Gentle” (as “The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before”), “More Tenderly Over Some of Us Than Others” (as “Let’s Get Lost”), “Rockabye,” “The Wedding”
The Cincinnati Review: “The Distance and the Spoils,” “Not the Waves as They Make Their Way Forward”
Green Mountains Review: “The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before” (as “Deciduous”)
Kenyon Review: “Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers,” “His Master’s Voice,” “If You Go Away”
The Manchester Review (UK): “Crossing,” “From a Bonfire,” “Gold Leaf”
The Nation: “That It Might Save, or Drown Them”
Phantom Limb: “Courtship”
Plume: “Revolver”
Poet Lore: “And Love You Too”
Poetry: “Brothers in Arms,” “Monomoy,” “Musculature,” “Stray,” “Wild Is the Wind”
Poetry Northwest: “Before the Leaves Turn Back”
Revolver: “Givingly”
Sugar House Review: “Meditation: On Being a Mystery to Oneself,” “The Sea, the Forest”
T Magazine/The New York Times: “What I See Is the Light Falling All Around Us”
32 Poems: “A Stillness Between the Hunting and the Chase”
*
“Gold Leaf” is for Tom Knechtel.
“Several Birds in Hand but the Rest Go Free” originally appeared in And Across Our Faces, a limited-edition chapbook published by Tim Geiger at Aureole Press, University of Toledo, Ohio, 2015. “Courtship,” “The Sea, the Forest,” and “Givingly” were reprinted in the same chapbook.
“Rockabye” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2017, edited by Natasha Trethewey and David Lehman, Scribner, New York, 2017.
“A Stillness Between the Hunting and the Chase”: The motto “Without mystery, what chance for hope” is a variation of part of a sentence in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, Anchor Books, New York, 2015. It’s from that book, as well, that I learned of the Renaissance correlation between hunger and vision in the training of falcons.
“For It Felt Like Power” was first published as a limited-edition broadside by Counterproof Press in the Art & Art History Department, School of Fine Arts, at the University of Connecticut in conjunction with my visit as the Wallace Stevens Poet, March 2016.
“Craft and Vision”: The opening is in response to George Oppen’s phrase “the bright light of shipwreck,” from section 9 of Of Being Numerous; “What happened, what didn’t happen, who does it matter to” is from Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Riverhead Books, New York, 2016.
The italicized line in “Monomoy” is a variation on a sentence in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Penguin Books, New York, 1980.
“Wild Is the Wind”: Thank you to Annalise Duerden, whose dissertation, “Mortal Verse: Memory in Early Modern Poetry of Love, Grief, and Devotion,” directed me to the relationship between tears and memory in the work of Donne and his contemporaries.
ALSO BY CARL PHILLIPS
POETRY
In the Blood
Cortège
From the Devotions
Pastoral
The Tether
Rock Harbor
The Rest of Love
Riding Westward
Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986–2006
Speak Low
Double Shadow
Silverchest
Reconnaissance
PROSE
Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry
The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination
TRANSLATION
Sophocles: Philoctetes
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen previous books of poetry, including Reconnaissance, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Courtship
Swimming
Brothers in Arms
Meditation: On Being a Mystery to Oneself
Musculature
Givingly
The Distance and the Spoils
Not the Waves as They Make Their Way Forward
Gold Leaf
Several Birds in Hand but the Rest Go Free
Stray
Revolver
The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before
From a Bonfire
And Love You Too
What I See Is the Light Falling All Around Us
Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers
If You Go Away
What the Lost Are For
Rockabye
His Master’s Voice
That It Might Save, or Drown Them
Gently, Though, Gentle
The Wedding
More Tenderly Over Some of Us Than Others
The Way One Animal Trusts Another
A Stillness Between the Hunting and the Chase
Before the Leaves Turn Back
For It Felt Like Power
Craft and Vision
Crossing
Monomoy
If You Will, I Will
Wild Is the Wind
The Sea, the Forest
Notes and Acknowledgments
Also by Carl Phillips
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Carl Phillips
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Image following table of contents by Tom Knetchel.
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eISBN 9780374717100
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