Carl Phillips

Steeple

Maybe love really does mean the submission of power—
I don’t know. Like pears on a branch, a shaking branch, 
in sunlight, 4 o’clock sunlight, all the ways we do harm, 
or refrain from it, when nothing says we have to.... Shining, 
everyone shining like that, as if reality itself depended 
on a nakedness as naked as naked gets; on a faith in each 
other as mistaken as mistaken tends to be, though I have 
loved the mistake of it—still do; even now—as I love
the sluggishness with which, like ceremony or, not much 
different, any man who, having seen himself at last, 
turns at first away—has to—the folded black and copper 
wings of history begin their deep unfolding, the bird itself, 
shuddering, lifts up into the half-wind that comes after—
higher—soon desire will resemble most that smaller thing, 
late affection, then the memory of it; and then nothing at all.

Carl Phillips

 

Passing

When the Famous Black Poet speaks, 
I understand 

that his is the same unnervingly slow 
rambling method of getting from A to B 
that I hated in my father, 
my father who always told me 
don't shuffle. 

The Famous Black Poet is 
speaking of the dark river in the mind 
that runs thick with the heroes of color, 
Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone 
who knew how to sing or when to run. 
I think of my grandmother, said 
to have dropped dead from the evil eye, 
of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and 
a generally difficult future headed her way 
in the still water 
of her brother's commode. 
I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans, 
and I want to tell the poet that the blues 
is not my name, that Alabama 
is something I cannot use 
in my business. 

He is so like my father, 
I don't ask the Famous Black Poet, 
afterwards, 
to remove his shoes, 
knowing the inexplicable black 
and pink I will find there, a cut 
gone wrong in five places. 
I don't ask him to remove 
his pants, since that too 
is known, what has never known 
a blade, all the spaces between, 
where we differ ... 

I have spent years tugging 
between my legs, 
and proved nothing, really. 
I wake to the sheets I kicked aside, 
and examine where they've failed to mend 
their own creases, resembling some silken 
obstruction, something pulled 
from my father's chest, a bad heart, 
a lung, 

the lung of the Famous Black Poet 
saying nothing I want to understand.

Carl Phillips

In this Light

Sure, I used to say his name like a truth that, just
by saying it aloud, I could make more true, which  
makes no more sense than having called it sorrow,
when it was only the rain making the branches hang
more heavily, so that some of them, sometimes,
even touched the ground…I see that now.  I can see 

how easy it is to confuse estrangement with what
comes before that, what’s really just another form
of being lost—lost, and trying to spell out wordlessly, 
hand-lessly, the difference between I fell and Sir,
I’m falling.  As for emptiness spilling where no one
ever wanted it to, and becoming compassion, as for 

how that happens—What if all we do is all we
can do?  What if longing, annihilation, regret are all this
life’s ever going to be, a little music thrown across and 
under it, ghost-song from a cricket-box when the last 
crickets have again gone silent, now, or be still forever,
as the gathering crowd, ungathering, slowly backs away?

Carl Phillips

 

To Be Worn Openly at the Wrist, or at the Chest and Hidden

If I believed in a god, he would be a sea god, like the sea

in its predictability—now approach, now recede—beneath

such a god I would not mind, I think, being the shore, say of the sea

what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss

without which what strategies would there be for softening

the hollowness that any victory, give it time, comes with,

how curb the risk of arrogance, with its doomed but

not undangerous hound, complacency?

... I made this for you—

put it on. I know it’s not going to matter whether the decisions

I made were the ones eventually I even meant to make, or

should have, or should have thought maybe more than

twice about. What’s history anyway, except—according to

the latest mouth saying so—just what happened: I flourished

undramatically, to no apparent purpose, like pretty much

everyone. The sea dragged the shore; the shore suffered the sea.

Carl Phillips

Brothers in Arms

The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,

something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about

happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable

was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’ve

learned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s living

alive still, maybe just

                                       awhile longer. Ghost bamboo that

the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color

of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when

I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thought

gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made,

however painfully, to see this life more up close. The higher

gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser

do the best they can — so a friend I somewhere along the way

lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before

passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must

surely, by now, be dead. There’s a rumored

                                                                               humbling effect

to loss that I bear no trace of. It’s not loss that humbles me.

What used to look like memory — clouds for hours breaking,

gathering, then breaking up again — lately seems instead

like a dance, one of those slower, too complicated numbers

I never had much time for. Not knowing exactly what it’s

come to is so much different from understanding that it’s come

to nothing. Why is it, then, each day, they feel more the same?

Carl Phillips

 

Through An Opening

It was as if they'd stepped into the head
of a wind god,and gotten trapped there and,
within captivity, made a space they could

sometimes recognize. Soon it looked
like home: chicken hawk; first stars;
a golden steeple. . . Almost, they could believe
each word of it,

the wordless parts also,
the particular riot—and beauty, for they did
admit as much—of a field on fire, the wind
tumbling through the god's hair, here and

there lifting it—so a kind of life, still—
They would make
a music of it. Singing
Hush now—why not hush? You're mine, coyote.