1 poem
Searchlights
All at once, the tiger lilies were out and we’d come too far, world
versus what I’ve called the world versus what I’ve made of it
and shaped to my taste, favoring, instead of the sky’s edgeless
statement about vastness, the sea’s mixed set of questions whose
only answers, finally, are the questions themselves, Is pleasure
in fact a lens to make suffering
more legible, for example, Do
betrayal and loyalty share the same mechanism? In my experience
there’s not that much difference, usually, between asking and
to have said quite enough. Sometimes a wind demolishes the trees
that were planted, years ago, for stopping the wind, one had come
to rely on them as upon memory, as when we mistakenly call
our memories proportionate, even remotely, to what was true,
when all we can really say, or maybe should, is This is what
feels true, mostly, when I think of it now,
his face a brokenness
but as a paleolithic fragment of a reindeer antler decorated
with an image of a horse might, too, be considered a brokenness,
him turning away from then back towards me, I can see my face,
my mouth moving inside it, I can see the words, though I can’t
hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does,
Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of rain, which is.
Carl Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His new book, Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, will appear in 2022 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.