Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet, born July 25, 1959. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
FROM BELOW
Carl Phillips
There’s a kind of shadow, easily missed, that
depth of field and depth of character
sometimes share
between them. Suffering, there, can seem
especially far away, though it’s
never far. It was one of those days when
just to have spoken at all
aloud feels like honesty or maybe more like
wanting to be honest, as if one had forgotten,
almost—not to want to,
but how. A lost art,
like predicting the future by
listening to the sounds leaves make, each
to the other, touching,
not touching …
And yet so much,
still, to wish for. To have loved
differently, less deeply, more
reliably. I call that hope,
not regret. Bellflowers,
sand flowers; there at the field’s far edge.
=======
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.