Sunday, April 30, 2023

Carl Phillips

Rockabye


                      Weeping, he seemed more naked 
than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when
we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying
someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then 
keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what
we called them made every difference. As when history
sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion
at once delivers
           and shrouds meaning . . . About love: a kind 
of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed
a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more
clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken
stay broken, sings the darkness, I 
                                     make the darkness 
sing it . . . Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows
of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Natasha Trethewey

  Elegy For the Native Guard                                         Now that the salt of their blood       Stiffens the saltier oblivion of...