And now,
the horse is entering
the sea, and the sea
holds it.
Where are we?
Behind us,
the beach,
yes, its
scrim,
yes, of
grass, dune, sky—Desire
goes by, and though
it’s wind of course making
the grass bend,
unbend, we say
it’s desire again, passing
us by, souveniring us with
gospel the grass, turned
choir, leans into,
Coming—
Lord, soon.
Because
it still matters, to say something. Like:
the heart isn’t
really breakable,
not in the way you mean, any more
than a life shatters,
—which is what
dropped shells can do, or a bond sworn to,
remember, once
couldn’t, a wooden boat between
unmanageable wave and rock or,
as hard, the shore.
The wooden boat is
not the heart,
the wave the flesh,
the rock the soul—
and if we thought so, we have merely been
that long
mistaken.
Also,
about the shore: it doesn’t
mean all trespass
is forgiven, if nightly
the sand is cleared of
any sign
we were here.
It doesn’t equal that whether
we were here or not
matters,
doesn’t—
Waves, because
so little of the world, even
when we say that it has
shifted, has:
same voices,
ghosts, same
hungers come,
stop coming—
Soon—
How far the land can be found to
be, and
of a sudden,
sometimes. Now—
so far from rest,
should rest be needed—
Will it drown?
The horse, I mean.
And I—who do not ride, and
do not swim
And would that I had never climbed
its back
And love you too
Carl Phillips, “The Truth,” from Pastoral. Copyright © 2000 by Carl Phillips. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Source:
Pastoral (Graywolf Press, 2000)
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Poet
Carl Phillips
b. 1959
Subjects
Nature,
Religion,
Relationships,
Pets,
Love,
Seas, Rivers, & Streams,
God & the Divine
Poetic Terms
Free Verse
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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