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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
ONE
Golden
Quarter-view, from Nauset
Interlude
Moving Target
Corral
As a Blow, from the West
The Clearing
The Deposition
TWO
By Hard Stages
The Clarity
Loose Hinge
The Threshing
The Silver Age
To Break, to Ride
Entry
THREE
Blue Shoulder
Spoken Part, for Countertenor Voice
Rock Harbor
FOUR
Trade
To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness
Cavalry
To Speak of It Now
Those Parts That Rescue Looked Like
Via Sacra
The Use of Force
FIVE
Return to the Land of the Golden Apples
Flight
Fretwork
Ravage
Canoe
Justice
Minotaur
Halo
Acknowledgments
Also by Carl Phillips
About the Author
Copyright
for Doug Macomber,
for Ellen Bryant Voigt,
and to my parents
Were there then no longing in time, there would be no peace in eternity.
JOSIAH ROYCE
ONE
GOLDEN
There, behind the raised
and extended
wing to which
no bird
no fiend
no haloing is
attached: two bodies,
fucking. It is difficult
to see, but that much—
from the way, with great
then greater
effort, their mouths
seem half to recall or
want to
a song even older,
holier than the one they
fill with—I can
guess. The rest,
I know: that it’s dream;
that, in dream,
to know a thing is to
have a gift and
not to, especially. Like
refusing to prove what
anyway all scrutable
signs point to. Stopped
trees are the least of it,
the still standing
but decidedly aslant
version of unanimous,
what looks at
first like approbation;
then—like trees,
and how a wind will
pass through. To turn
with and not
against it
no more means
the wind is with us than
the gods are. I don’t
believe each gets what
each deserves.
QUARTER-VIEW, FROM NAUSET
Love, etc. Have been remembering
the part in Sophocles
where a god advises the two heroes
they should be as
twin lions, feeding—how
even the flesh of late
slaughter does not
distract them from keeping
each over the other
a guarding eye.
What part of this is love, and
what survival
is never said,
though the difference it makes is
at least that between a lily and, say,
a shield. I think of you
often, especially here,
at the edge of the world or a
part of it, anyway,
by which I mean of course
more, you will have guessed, than
the coast, just now, I
stand on. Against it,
the water dashes with
the violence of two men who,
having stripped it, now take for their
own the body of
a third man on the bad
sofa of an even worse
motel room in what eventually
is movie—one
we’ve seen … The way
what looks like rape
might not be. You’d like
the light here. At
times, a color you’d call anything but blue.
INTERLUDE
Briefly, an ease
akin to those parts of
the air that
allow the bird respite from
the effort of muscle
flight entails.
As I said: briefly.
It does not matter, I
understand now, my having
hoped in no way to
resemble anyone—
this, the reason
why the difficulty, I have
often been sure, with
death will be less
the dying than the having been
finally always like
everyone else; that
particular
humiliation: to admit
as much.
Very briefly, it
seems now.
In the manner of happiness
or an only-half-grounded
fear or whatever
else can at once
be both pressing and
ignorable, until—as when
the evidence has grown
embarrassing, so why
shouldn’t we, let us
throw it away—until it is
like that and, soon, it
is that. We’ll assume again
our new positions: myself, at
last arcing
the body
over. —Up. Into yours.
MOVING TARGET
If to be patient were less
an exercise
and more a name to be worn, say,
in the middle—
that he might wear it—
Of the linen sash to
his robe, of linen,
that his hands have
fashioned a knot such that
the knot suggests now a dragonfly in
flight from what is harmless and
not, entirely—
that he might, if at all, know this
only as when without understanding it
we know we have and have come to
expect we shall have always
upon others
an effect we do not
intend—
His face:
a face, turning. And
then a turned one.
CORRAL
for Percival Everett
Fleetingly, the mule is neither
justice nor injustice, but
another muscled
abbreviation in which
right and wrong take in
each other no apparent
interest, as if—impossible, on
purpose—to remind how
not everything is
vengeance, not everything
wants reason. The mule
intends nothing of the contrast he
makes inevitably
in a field otherwise all
horses: five of them, four
standin
g around and nosing
the only one whose flesh, white
entirely, lacks pattern, unless
the light counts,
the only one not standing,
lying with the particular
stillness of between when
a death has occurred
already and when we
ourselves shall have
learned of it. Until then,
that which before was
patternless and not standing
stands up, white, patterned
by the countable light,
the five horses step
into then just past a shy
gallop, the mule
among them, then beside them,
the mule falling in time behind
slightly, not like defeat—don’t
think it—like, instead one who,
understanding (as a mule
cannot) in full the gravity
of the truth always that he carries
with him, can
afford to pity
honestly a glamour that
extends even to the legs, classical,
on which each horse for now outruns the mule.
AS A BLOW, FROM THE WEST
Names for the moon:
Harvest; and Blue; and
Don’t Touch Me—
and Do. I dreamed I had
made a home on the side
of a vast, live volcano,
that the rest was water,
that I was one among many of
no distinction: we but
lived there, like so many
birds that, given the chance
not to fly for once in
formation, won’t take it, or
cannot, or—or—but
what of choice can a bird know?
Down the volcano’s sides,
in the pose of avalanche
except frozen, and so
densely it seemed impossible
they should not strangle
one another—yet they
did not—grew all
the flowers whose names
I’d meant to master;
it was swift, the dream—so
much, still, to catch
up to—though I could not
have known that, of course,
then: isn’t it only in
the bracing and first wake of
loss that we guess most cleanly
the speed with which what held us
left us? In the dream, the world
was birdless, lit, yielding, it
seemed safe, which is not to say
you weren’t in it. You were, but
changed somewhat, not so much
a man of few words,
more the look of one who
—having entered willfully
some danger, having just returned
from it—chooses instead
of words his body as
the canvas across which to
wordlessly broadcast his coming
through. We lived
in a manner that—if it
didn’t suggest an obliviousness
to a very real and always-there
danger—I would call heady;
it was not that. Think,
rather, of the gods: how,
if they do in fact know
everything, they must understand
also they will be eventually
overthrown by a new order,
which is at worst a loss
of power, but not of life,
as the gods know it. I was
not, that is, without
ambition: the illicit, in
particular, I would make it
my business to have studied;
and of that which is gained
easily, to want none
of it. Flowers; names
for the moon. It was
swift, the dream, the body
a wordless and stalled
avalanche that, since forgivable—
if I could—I would forgive, poor
live but flagging, dying now
volcano. And the water
around its sides receding with
a dream’s swiftness: everywhere,
soon, sand and sand, a desert that,
because there was no water,
and because they missed it,
the natives had called a sea, and
to the sea had given a name:
Friendship, whose literal
translation in the country of
dream is roughly “that which
all love evolves
down to”—
Until to leave, or
try to—and have drowned
trying—becomes refrain,
the one answer each time
to whatever question:
what was the place called?
what was the house like?
what was it we did inside it?
how is it possible that it cannot be enough to have given
up to you now the dream as—for a time, remember—I did give
my truest self? why won’t you take it—if a gift, if yours?
THE CLEARING
Had the light
changed, possibly—or,
differently, was that how I’d
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
—Who just
said that?
Whose the body—where—that 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
failure—
Even now, shall I choose? Do I
get to?
Dearest-once-to-me
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 you— or
how?
Whom for?
If stay my hand—where
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 of—
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 phase—
less Roman,
more Greek, more
birch than
ash, none of shame’s
nobility attached, but—
worse—the 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 glories—
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?
•
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
will—with
heat only,
shivering—”
•
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 …
Look at yourself,
Look at you.
Have I not
looked there—
possibility for
—into it?
How small,
•
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 be—
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 dream—but as
if so, moving at first
with the force of
Rock Harbor Page 1
