Carl Phillips

About what’s past,Hold on when you can, I used to say, And when you can’t, let go, as if memory were one of those mechanical bulls, easily dismountable, should the ride turn rough. I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge — metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un- knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously, a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge every few or so seasons, and — just once — a runaway child whom I gave some money to and told no one about, having promised ...You must keep what you’ve promised very close to your heart, that way you’ll never forget

First snow—I release her into it— I know, released, she won't come back. This is different from letting what, already, we count as lost go. It is nothing like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes: I love her. Released, she seems for a moment as if some part of me that, almost, I wouldn't mind understanding better, is that not love? She seems a part of me, and then she seems entirely like what she is: a white dog, less white suddenly, against the snow, who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it, I release her. It's as if I release her because I know.

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.

When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more than terms — how they can matter, suddenly — I can tell he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed to fail — that the body is — keeps me almost steady, if steadiness is what a gift for a while brings — feathers, burst- at-last pods of milkweed, October — before it all fades away. Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and restraining orders and the eventual go fuck yourself get your ass out of here don’t go

for Erin, for others There are places in this world where you can stand somewhere holy and be thinking If it’s holy then why don’t I feel it, something, and while waiting, like it will any moment happen and maybe this is it, a man accosts you, half in his tongue, half in yours, he asks if maybe you are wanting to get high, all the time his damaged finger twitching idly like on purpose at a leash that holds an animal you can’t quite put your finger on at first, until you ask him, ask the man, and then he tells you it’s a weasel and, of course, it is, you’ve seen them, you remember now, you say Of course, a weasel. There are men inside the world who, never mind how much they tell you that they’re trying, can’t persuade you that it isn’t you, it’s life, it’s life in general where it hurts, a fear, of everything, of nothing, when if only they would name it maybe then you’d stay, you all the time aware it’s you that’s talking, so who’s going anywhere but here, beside them, otherwise why come, why keep on coming, when you can’t get to believing what they tell you any more than you believed the drugs the other man was offering wouldn’t harm you. Still, you think, you took them and you’re still alive, enough to take the hand, that wants, that promises to take you to where damage is a word, that’s all, like yes,so Yes you say,I’ll come, you tell him Show me.

The wind was high—it gave to your hair a lift in equal parts gradual, steep, disarming— I love a storm, and said so; by I have always loved better the wreckage after, I did not mean instead of, but a preference. To the air, an edge anyone would call arctic—isn't that why we left it nameless? To your face, a look I'd admired before in the bodies of those who seem not so much indifferent as made ignorant, or stunned as if by sudden luck, or else repentant and in payment, somehow, for what all price falls like an irrelevance, a stole, an expensive sail in a calm away from. Sex as a space available where neither loss nor regret figures—imagine that. Or not having, finally, to take anything away—in the form of photographs of the mostly ice that the harbor's water, the shore past that, the street after had become; or as words like those that came to me:green, kind of, lit almost, by as if from within in places, a spill but an arrested one, less force than the idea of it, block and edge like the chance for pattern, but spent now or only, from the very start, false —false and singing. The wind was high; it exaggerated what you were already, a man returning toward shelter he can't see yet, but believes just ahead exists, the sort of man for whom to doubt at all is treason. By not unfaithful, I understood I could mean both things: I'd do nothing I'd promised not to— Also, there is nothing I'll forget.

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder and, on his chest, the larger bruise, star-shaped, a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands, has tried—can't remember . . . That kind of rhythm to it, even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, which is why we keep coming here, to find it, or that's what we say. We dive in and, as usual, the swimming feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first slackens that much more quickly, if you don't look back. Regret, like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther, leaving the shore the way the water—in its own watered, of course, version of semaphore–keeps leaving the subject out, flashing Why should it matter now and Why, why shouldn 't it, as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.

By then, of course, they’d done plenty in the name of recklessness — their word as well, though incorrect, for wilderness. Ah, scutchweed, rushlightitude, if not, why not, strowbegone, nor sheep, fa la, shall graze. The way, incredibly, for most it’s still enough to have noticed a similar weather pattern between regret and the windy plains of remorse, like that must make them the same, or should, or at least no more different than a fetish for being eaten alive and whole is, apparently, from the desire to leave loneliness behind forever — a reasonable desire, I suppose, but in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t crowd it from view    ...    some could almost see this, eventually; others chose not to. Some — the luckiest — arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where to be understood entirely stops being the main thing, or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl before them, one after the other, each a seemingly vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was was their own.

The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so I’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow me everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s more the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — that I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty, like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s taken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much my whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably, gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering? When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay inside of, I’m not saying forever, I could last a fair time on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose command through a summer garden. Let those plants that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.

Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch water from wells in buckets, then pour it out for those animals that, long domesticated, would likely perish before figuring out how to get for themselves. That dog, for example, whose refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child, for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What is it about vulnerability that can make the hand draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force, destructive?Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost all of it, all the tenderness, away