drop the bird whole—dead,
undamaged,
mercy—
from her mouth. And want no more.
MINOTAUR
What stalked the room was never envy.
Is not regret, anymore,
nor fail. We are
—discovered:
we resemble hardly
ever those birds now, noising but
not showing from their double
cloisters—
leaves,
fog.
I miss them.
I forget what I wanted to
mean to you.
I forget what I
meant to give to you, that I haven’t.
Ménage.
You, in sleep still,
the dog restless, wanting
out, like a dream of the body caught
shining inside a struggling whose
end it cannot know will be
no good one.
Outside, the basil shoots to flower; the neighbors’
burro, loose, astray, has
found the flowers, his
head enters and tilts
up from the angle confusable with
sorrow,
adoration. His hooves pass
—like God doing, for now,
no damage to them—
the heirloom tomatoes: Beam’s Yellow Pear,
Russian Black,
looked like, how it tasted
commonly.
All that time.
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”
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
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Paperback ISBN 0-374-52885-3
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eISBN 9781466880085
First eBook edition: August 2014