Four Poems by Carl Phillips
PN Review 262, November - December 2021
Fall Colors
I’ve been looking hard at all my friendships – all of them together,
and each on its own – and although they feel real enough, from what
I can tell, on both sides, I understand now that what they have in common
is a lack of warmth and compassion; who can say at this point why that is,
or how it matters now, if it does. I say I understand it, but it’s more true
to say I’ve come to understand it, having had it pointed out to me, for no
reason that I remember, by the only man I think I’ve ever loved absolutely,
and still do. That’s a separate thing. Like my fear of fire. Or like how
much of my time I spend pretending I’m not afraid, negotiating this life
with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves
the handling of fires daily
daily handles a fire. Some days, it works: I
almost believe myself, or more precisely, and more disturbingly, if I really
think about it (Don’t think about it), I almost believe in the self that’s just
an imitation of a self I want others to believe in enough for me eventually
to believe it too. Believing in, versus believing…The trumpet vine that grows
up the gingko’s trunk and has even reached its branches is an example of
instinct, not affection. Twice a day, instead of walking, I take my dog for
what I call a ramble, where each corner we turn feels like a turning, as well,
of imagination. The sun’s behind us now; its heat, on this cold November
afternoon that’ll soon join all the rest whose details I’ve forgotten, seems
a small encouragement: all that’s needed, most times. I stop; the dog stops –
our shadows, too. They bloom our shadows north-northeast in front of us.
Scattered Snows, to the North
Does it matter that the Roman
Empire was still early in its slow
unwinding into never again? Then,
as now, didn’t people burst into tears
in front of other people, or in private,
for no reason that they were willing
to give, or they weren’t yet able to,
or for just no reason? I’ve never
stopped missing you, I used to
practice saying, for when I’d
need those lines, as I assumed
I would, given what I knew then –
nothing, really – about things
like love, trust, the betrayal
of trust, and a willfulness that’s
only deepened inside me, all
these years, during which I can
almost say I’ve missed no one –
though it hurts,
to say it…
Honestly, the Roman Empire,
despite my once having studied it,
barely makes any sense to me now,
past the back-and-forthing of
patrolled borders as the gauge
and proof of hunger’s addictive
and erosive powers. But there were
people, of course, too, most of them
destined to be unremembered,
who filled in their drawn lives
anyway – because what else
is there? – to where the edges
gave out. If it was night, they lit
fires, presumably. Tears
were tears.
Heroic Interval
Up from the bottom of wherever in the mind things go
to be forgotten, most of them forever, he reappears
at the edge of that meadow inside me I’ve spent
most of my life trying to convince others isn’t made up
at all, but real. As
he was. Is. Above him, a bewilderment
of black swans pulling their bodies across a band
of nightfall, though it can’t be night, for the meadow’s
not dark yet, it keeps flashing like a basin of water set down
*
in sunlight. As he walks towards me, it almost looks
like the routine gesture with interruptions that I
used to think love more or less came down to, before I
figured out I could stop –
I could always have stopped –
and should maybe try to. Closer, now. He parts the grasses,
breast-high, in front of him. His arms like blades
meant for winnowing intimacy from tenderness, or
*
nostalgia from truth. Nothing’s changed. Still the kind
of man who sees no reason to take his gloves off –
assassin gloves – during sex. Still a kind of dream,
that moment in dream when a friend whom you’ve
learned not to trust entirely
slowly turns to tell you –
half threatening it, half consolation – the only dream
is this one. But it isn’t a dream – I can tell. He’d be
taking his gloves off. He’d be raising his soft hands
to his face – scorched map; busted compass. He’d have a face.
Rehearsal
By then the point of the forest was the getting through it.
Then it lay behind them, all but its sharper details – flies licking at
dried blood, I think, on a random tree stump – getting swiftly lost,
its muffled birdsong, too, that had come less, it seemed, from
the trees than from beneath, mostly, as if somewhere deep,
deep inside the earth. What if meeting you has been
the one good reason I lasted so long in a world that must
eventually not include me, I almost said to him. Past the forest,
the shore, where the land ended, where briefly the waves hitting it
seemed the latest example of how squandering momentum can
become routine; while, upon the waves, the taken-for-grantedness
of shadowplay seemed its own example: how one way to prove power
can be to quietly assume it. Then except for offshore, where the dark lay
like – defiantly – a ship at anchor, everything was itself. As it always
had been. They took off their shoes, their clothes.
They swam out to the dark ship.
Carl Phillips is the author of fifteen previous books of poetry. His collection Then the War and Selected Poems: 2007-2020 won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2023. His poem ‘Scattered Snows, to the North’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
Other collections include Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) and Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St Louis.
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