Rock Harbor

by Carl Phillips

  properly called a letter we

  understand: If

  you a minute could you when

  said I might however

  what if haven’t I loved

  —who?

  As I remember it, I’d lie

  in general alone, after, neither in

  want nor—at first—sorry inside

  the almost-dark I’d

  wake to. The only stirring

  the one of last light getting

  scattered, as if for

  my consideration. All over the room.

  CAVALRY

  The best views—the ones

  from horseback—will be

  no longer: surely no one can

  fail to see how

  the horses, perishing, are

  all but done for. Already, though,

  the idea of infantry

  rears before us—a prospect

  we find not without its

  portion, more than fair, of

  invitation. So much

  as well, meanwhile, will go

  unchanged: the peculiar,

  undistracted

  sorrow attached to

  bugle call, at sunset, a sorrow

  finally that of inquiry

  itself, whose modes are two:

  to branch,

  to cluster,

  manifesting itself in

  panicles, as of lilacs, the still

  remembered stoop we called

  bluebells, if blue—if white,

  snowdrops, wasn’t

  that it,

  when we knew no better than

  to name the light at dusk

  flirtation,

  for how it seemed

  each night like—

  first—going,

  then gone forever, and then

  came back. It seems less to have

  been flirtation—more,

  a career spent saying,

  perpetually,

  farewell, until

  who believes it? Even now,

  we have only to lift

  long enough our

  faces, the light

  again gives what it

  always has to flesh,

  a color that makes

  briefly forgettable how

  the art of casting bronze

  is a mostly

  lost one.

  There seems nothing that is

  impossible. Soon, darkness;

  we’ll put the horses down,

  a mercy. We’ll salvage, find

  rest beside their still

  good-for-trade

  saddles: cool, and

  wet, by morning.

  TO SPEAK OF IT NOW

  Leaving, he conducted his

  body as if it were that of a child

  Pharaoh, who

  understands to a sometimes

  dimming,

  brightening other times,

  degree the possibilities for

  great power,

  has been told it somewhere

  rests finally inside

  himself.

  How he will use it,

  whether he will or won’t

  live to do so, neither

  the hand, ring-heavy, nor

  the head beneath its abbreviated

  tower of crown

  quite answers.

  North of here, in a country he

  won’t ever know of,

  snow falls like the part

  of argument where

  all room for argument now

  diminishes,

  is gone, becomes like

  dream that

  —did it happen?

  Made small

  by distance,

  through a window,

  the people he does not easily yet

  call his own

  seem the pinchings-off

  of clay,

  what gets forgiven that it is dirty

  by the ease with which it can be

  shaped into something beautiful that

  also serves.

  That he thinks of them, though,

  that way, is

  less than believable, it is

  unlikely still he considers them much

  at all.

  He is quiet mostly. This

  does not mean that if asked to

  name, among the world’s most

  lovely things,

  the second—or if third,

  a close one—he

  would not know.

  The Nile by moonlight.

  The Nile with the stars upon it.

  THOSE PARTS THAT RESCUE LOOKED LIKE

  The usual, pulled, expansive

  afternoon—the flattish

  light of it less

  disclosure, more a stripping from

  the field its

  small details—

  I had almost forgotten that definition

  requires shadow. I had

  been distracted, had found

  myself among the ones who would be

  persuaded, singing as if

  of song were made the ship called Self-

  Persuasion: we shall not

  want what we do not

  miss, we cannot

  miss what we don’t

  remember …

  But if persuasion is

  not a ship? if

  no persuasion? —I

  did not ask. I’d forgotten, almost,

  that to want to know a life

  entirely is not

  the worst thing: obliteration,

  for example, is worse—

  one familiarity, by another,

  getting canceled; or,

  inside one, getting

  lost, which is

  worse still, oblivion,

  less to escape from than to

  lie not-touching-not-touched-by

  beside an agony that

  is, to love, as

  shadow is to light—as,

  to the body, is penetration.

  I had forgotten: almost

  all of it, the time of year, of

  light making of—for hours—the field

  a flatness, even

  song itself, I

  shall not want, I cannot

  miss, the notes not

  notes any longer but

  something ravenous and—in their

  flight, as from

  parts of sky more

  turbulent

  toward others, clearer—marking

  without marking the crossed, crossed

  again field

  beneath them, less their shadows,

  more what shadow gave, more

  everything it darkened.

  VIA SACRA

  The horse rides easy.

  Intermittently,

  that I can ride at all, still, can

  seem the miracle that everyone

  here calls it; that I ride

  well—

  what words?

  Roadside,

  the marigolds look for

  all the world that

  yet is knowable as

  if they knew, impossibly, that

  in a country not far, not

  this one, their

  petals are considered worth

  gathering first in

  shallow bowls, then

  whispering a prayer over and just

  past.

  That I might never be estranged (from

  what, though?), might be

  instead what is meant, precisely, when

  some sing

  Spotless;

  Immaculate

  —others, singing.

  The candles they carry

  are of beeswax,

  from a believing, once, that bees

  were virgin-born. They aren’t, but

  by that logic, unbleached

  let be the linen the veil is made of, whether

  purple, violet, />
  blue—draped across, of every house,

  its eastern wall, to show divinity

  has hid itself, has

  left. It is as if the world were

  boat, and God its keel; or the world

  is bird—God its breastbone, ourselves

  the left-to-our-own-devices

  acolytes defining with rods

  of willow a boundary we cross

  and cross,

  a story, a blind man in the crowd and

  stepping free. He takes to his eyes

  the longing with which our course,

  behind, lies strewn, he

  is unblinded. First thing he sees: a boy

  who stammers; who’s

  let his candle fall.

  THE USE OF FORCE

  Framed by window, the branches

  swim in place, they

  seem to. No

  wonder struggling gets

  so often, at first, mistaken

  for wild abandon: a very

  likeness.

  Difference matters,

  as in: in you, a permanence

  you have known, that

  I shall never. As in:

  the two of us regarding

  equally but differently

  the sea,

  the sea, in

  equal but different parts.

  Distinction matters. Distraction

  loves us. Attention

  must be paid, else we are

  happier, yes, but what we were

  lies ended— Did I really

  think that, ever?

  Do I?

  A history of forgetting

  is not the same as

  a habit of it, though

  history is not

  unconcerned with pattern,

  and pattern is to habit

  as a kind of twin whose hair,

  parted leftside instead of right,

  prevents an otherwise

  confusion. As between, say,

  the man who in crime finds

  a taste he gradually, slow, more

  and more comes

  into; and the man who, like

  any criminal

  worth admiring, admires

  precision, the angle beyond which

  the victim’s neck, bent

  back, perforce

  must break. Hold still, you said. I

  did.

  The proof is vision.

  FIVE

  RETURN TO THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN APPLES

  Blue wash. The winged horses look

  like horses—artless, free

  of connotation. They hide

  just now their wings,

  or they forget, or do not

  think to make

  much more of a gift

  for flight than

  of the water viewable

  behind them—a sea,

  a lake—

  which they ignore, pulling

  at the record-of-where-a-wind-was,

  the now-resist-now-don’t,

  and other flowers

  whose growth has even

  outstripped the grass, the colors

  wind as far as the ruined tower, up

  even to the room that

  crowns it, over the half moss, half

  ledge of window, glassless,

  into the room, which is small,

  not empty: the body,

  and a mirror. Inside

  the mirror, the body

  turning, stopping,

  —sometimes the way, in

  sudden shadow, will any

  animal; sometimes,

  as the hero stops

  in the gathering light of reputation

  he soon must recognize

  is his own. The body

  inside the mirror, turning,

  singing I am the one who forces,

  I am the one who stays

  to watch,

  I am the grit gone somehow

  shine, the blow,

  the forced thing, opening

  —Singing inside the mirror,

  to no one, to

  itself, the body folding, and

  unfolding—as if

  map, then shroud—its song.

  FLIGHT

  If blackness

  were every blankness, and not

  all colors, if

  wings were parts to be lifted

  easily from the body, then brought

  back home, and the wings

  tipped first in yellow,

  in red, after,

  would any of these make the bird

  more yours?

  If the bird is native here,

  and you are native,

  so that seeing it now is not

  a first time, seeing,

  what happened then, that since

  has acted upon memory

  as on photographs

  will a creek they’ve fallen into,

  the water bleeding, making

  ghost of now the tree somebody

  climbs halfway,

  the parked car others take

  forever boarding, and the field raveling,

  prairie, then sea …

  What would be different, wouldn’t

  each change equal ruin the way

  it does, and the hands that clap

  still be your own,

  clapping? To watch the bird

  undone, undoing—isn’t that it?

  FRETWORK

  Reports are various—

  conflicting also:

  many fell,

  a few;

  like taken cities …

  •

  Whether or not

  to any loss there is weight

  assignable,

  or a music given

  —some play of notes,

  slow-trumpeted,

  for which to listen

  is already to be

  too late;

  whether forgetting is

  or is not proof of

  mercy, henceforth let

  others say.

  •

  Is not victory itself

  the proof of victory?

  •

  Little hammer, chasing—onto

  unmarked metal—pattern,

  decoration,

  a name,

  a scar upon the face

  of history, what

  has no face

  •

  Of briar

  and thorn, my bed.

  •

  —I stand in clover.

  RAVAGE

  He has made me to know,

  in myself, a compassion I have

  no use for.

  He fairly breaks—as they say—my heart.

  He passes into and free of the light,

  the light itself

  trophaic in its semblance

  of taking leave.

  Clouds;

  late fog:

  he has caused me to understand

  and record

  the difference,

  as between the sea when

  it seems mostly a delicate, black

  negotiation

  and the sky at night when it wants

  for stars.

  Wild bird

  at rest

  in the very hand to which it once was blur

  entirely,

  all resistance—

  Had I not

  called it a thing done with

  already, the better part

  of pleasure? Did he not find me

  lying still

  in the part at least I had thought

  to keep?

  CANOE

  The brow of a man who,

  when he takes to his own

  another’s body, means

  somewhere also I would

  like to help.

  The lake a compass,

  the canoe its needle,

  ourselves inside

&nb
sp; that—

  The way

  what’s missing can go

  unnoticed beside what’s there,

  until we notice: these

  were his arms,

  now raised, now dropped,

  lifting.

  Slight pockings,

  like the chips that give

  historically more character

  to marble retrieved

  after long burial,

  bust of

  the emperor Hadrian

  in that period just

  past the death, on purpose,

  of his boy favorite.

  Lilies,

  lilies.

  Watch, he said; and

  bringing the paddle

  up, vertical, leaving

  only the blade submerged

  —stilling the blade—

  he dragged the water:

  we were turning …

  Lost,

  as a thing

  can be, beyond all calling

  of it back—none, anymore,

  calling—

  It seemed related to

  what I’d heard

  about cars, ice,

  steer always

  into the skid’s direction—

  those lessons where

  to have learned means nothing

  next to having had

  to apply.

  I want forgiveness to be as easy as the gestures for it, it

  isn’t, is it?

  JUSTICE

  Nameless, or else

  many-named, no matter,

  but the dog must come

  with an allegiance heightened,

  almost, to machine.

  I want her lean,

  I want her hungry. I want her

  ruthless, or not at all.

  Mornings,

  let her lick the grass dry

  of dew, my tired hands,

  by night, of the lives

  unwittingly, indifferently,

  they’ve touched. Oh,

  who is heartless?

  Ghost-dog. Mirror-dog.

  Shadow whose every move is

  nothing, nothing without

  what casts it.

  Let even the most

  trained of eyes

  find the difference

  between us

  hard measuring. Of

  that which cannot be

  had entirely, understand:

  I’ll have no part. No

  feathers, then—blue,

  obvious; nor the yellow

  undershaftings, either,

  that the otherwise mostly

  spatter-and-bronze

  flicker shows best

  in flight.

  No.

  Let the dog be

  ever memorial to that

  precision that makes geometry

  more than seem, again,

  worth trusting: the gun

  —raised, fired—the line

  traceable from where hit to

  where the bird, broken, falls,

  and the dog knowing, already,

  where—making

  for it … Bring it back.

  Give. Only then. Let her