Carl Phillips

In the east country where I must have lived once,

or how else remember it, the words came falling to

every side of me, words from a life that I’d thought,

if not easy, might at least be possible, though that

was then: little crown and little burst of arrows

and ritual, loyalty, they are not the same . . . I lay

rippling like a field shot through with amethyst

and reason. Then it seemed I myself was the field,

the words fell toward, then into me, each one no

sooner getting understood, than it touched the ground.

There’s a weed whose name I’ve meant all summer

to find out: in the heat of the day, dangling pods hardly

worth the noticing; in the night, blue flowers . . . It’s as if

a side of me that he’d forgotten had forced into the light,

briefly, a side of him that I’d never seen before, and now

I’ve seen it. It is hard to see anyone who has become

like your own body to you. And now I can’t forget.

Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,

and in their lying suddenly still again – flat, and still,

like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more

available, more to lose therefore, more to love, or

try to …

            But to look up from the leaves, remember,

is a choice also, as if up from the shame of it all,

the promiscuity, the seeing-how-nothing-now-will-

save-you, up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-

signing the ground before you the way, lately, all

the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,

which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward

belief – whatever, in the end, belief

                        is … You can

look up, or you can close the eyes entirely, making

some of the world, for a moment, go away, but only

some of it, not the part about hurting others as the one

good answer to being hurt, and not the part that can

at first seem, understandably, a life in ruins, even if –

refusing ruin, because you

                        can refuse – you look

again, down the steep corridor of what’s just another

late winter afternoon, dark as night already, dark

the leaves and, darker still, the door that, each night,

you keep meaning to find again, having lost it, you had

only to touch it, just once, and it bloomed wide open …

Squalor of leaves. November. A lone

hornets’ nest. Paper wasps. Place where

everything that happens is as who says it will,

because. As in Why shouldn’t we have

come to this, why not, this far, this

close to

        that below-zero where we almost

forget ourselves, rise at last unastonished

at the wreckery of it, what the wreckage

somedays can seem all along to have

been mostly, making you wonder what fear

is for, what prayer is, if not the first word

and not the last one either, if it changes

nothing of what you are still, black stars,

black

        scars, crossing a field that you’ve

crossed before, holding on, tight, though

careful, for you must be careful, so easily

torn is the veil diminishment comes

down to as it lifts and falls, see it falling,

now it lifts again, why do we love, at all?