Hymn

By Carl Phillips b. 1959 Carl Phillips

Less the shadow

than you a stag, sudden, through it.

Less the stag breaking cover than

the antlers, with which

crowned.

Less the antlers as trees leafless,

to either side of the stag’s head, than—

between them—the vision that must

mean, surely, rescue.

Less the rescue.

More, always, the ache

toward it.

When I think of death, the gleam of

the world darkening, dark, gathering me

now in, it is lately

as one more of many other nights

figured with the inevitably

black car, again the stranger’s

strange room entered not for prayer

but for striking

prayer’s attitude, the body

kneeling, bending, until it finds

the muscled patterns that

predictably, given strain and

release, flesh assumes.

When I think of desire,

it is in the same way that I do

God: as parable, any steep

and blue water, things that are always

there, they only wait

to be sounded.

And I a stone that, a little bit, perhaps

should ask pardon.

My fears—when I have fears—

are of how long I shall be, falling,

and in my at last resting how

indistinguishable, inasmuch as they

are countless, sire,

all the unglittering other dropped stones.

Source: Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000)

Biography

Carl Phillips is the author of more than eight books of poetry, including most recently Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, The Rest of Love, Rock Harbor, and The Tether, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award; he is the translator of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Phillips teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis. He recently was awarded the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

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