Posts tagged: carl phillips
When I point
out to you that
the flat face of the lake’s water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing’s
beauty, can at last
define it.
(Carl Phillips)
There was a saint once,
he had but to ring across
water a small bell, all
manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,
both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies
a-shimmer with
that hope especially that
hunger brings, whatever
the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming
into the saint’s hand and,
instead of getting,
becoming food.
I have thought, since, of
your body—-as I first came
to know it, how it still
can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and last gesture
of the fish leaving water
for flesh, for guarantee
they will die, and I cannot
rest on what to call it.
Not generosity, or
a blindness, trust, brute
stupidity. Not the soul
distracted from its natural
prayer, which is attention,
for in the story they are
paying attention. They
lose themselves eyes open.
(carl phillips)
I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,
something that could know better, and should, therefore,—but does not:
a form of faith, you’ve said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit at first, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true.
(carl phillips)
There’s life as we know it
and there is death, lots of it.
In between though, to the air at times,
a sense of possibility, it’s effect
delusional so that often
we cannot help it, this feeling inside us
so close to an almost
uncontainable joy.
Moments when we’re as blameless
as we are invincible
We’ll have left here,
changed presumably, to guess
from the steady
coming of us both to wanting, differently,
the body. Still, I want it
with you, steadfastness remains
one of my gifts, the other
less gift, perhaps, than simply a matter
of I can’t help it,
namely a knack from making anything
mean something.
(carl phillips)
the light shivering with
meaning, but one that
is difficult to
translate because
language should be—-and
is—-flexible,
it recalls, in
this way, morality,
how there’s nothing, it
seems, not to be given
in to.
(carl phillips)
And no, he won’t come,
ever, back. This is the widening, but
not unbeautiful wake of his having
left us, and this
is the light—-
true,
exotic,
faded slightly—-in which
much, still, is possible
(carl phillips)
When did the yard get
this swollen—-
mint, apples,
like proof of all that
anyway went
on, in our distraction?
(carl phillips)
I might have
added that not
only do I respect, I
require mystery.
Less and less
am I one of those who believes
To know a thing,
first you touch it
(carl phillips)
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn’t, some way, require touch,
it is the unsubstantial—that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it—that most bewilders
(carl phillips)
