Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet, born July 25, 1959. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
LEDA, AFTER THE SWAN
Carl Phillips
Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,
the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,
I recognized
something more
than swan, I can’t say.
There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,
and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down
to the heat-crippled field,
ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,
and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere–
then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.