Darkening, Brightening
Listening’s not enough, you’ve gotta watch them, that way they feel
less lonely. Him singing. Maybe I’m singing it. Latest hunch:
it’s been too late, forever. Raft of sunset. Swing
of the mind like a fist, swinging—rough here, here
more delicate, as if undecided: to mean no harm, or
to not especially,
just now, be looking for it. The raft
noticeably less steady here, where the water this
otherwise silence most resembles has turned abruptly still:
braid-less, the water. Like remembering the words themselves—
Swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow, and
Very little we wouldn’t have done for what we thought
was power—but not
who said them. The breeze
notwithstanding. The usual first moths appearing,
moth-like, flower-like, like those flowers from childhood
we used to call Strip Heaven, a game, something someone
played, once. The way I’m figuring it, the half-life’s
not a half-life,
when it’s all you’ve known, he says, watching me
watch back. The sound of two bucks locking antlers. Sound
of luck—shadow-luck—when, unexpectedly, it seems
there’s been
some mistake. I hate the word unbearable. All this talk about
trust coming always down, after much struggling, to a
drowned body:
easily lost; not irretrievable—Very well, then. Drag the lake.
—
Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Reconnaissance. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
—
Image: “Mesolithic representation of a herd of stags.” Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Creative Commons license 4.0.