Carl Phillips

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns. How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there, unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called doubt, or that other one, persuasion, the broken one, in three clean pieces    ...    Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening, seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that the world keeps saying it does,know it, hold on tight to it, as if the world were rumor, how every rumor rings true, lately. When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it: this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    ...

What do we do with the body, do we burn it, do we set it in dirt or in stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey, oil, and then gauze and tip it onto and trust it to a raft and to water? What will happen to the memory of his body, if one of us doesn't hurry now and write it down fast? Will it be salt or late light that it melts like? Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap to a pen elsewhere —how are we to regard his effects, do we throw them or use them away, do we say they are relics and so treat them like relics? Does his soiled linen count? If so, would we be wrong then, to wash it? There are no instructions whether it should go to where are those with no linen, or whether by night we should memorially wear it ourselves, by day reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty. Here, on the floor behind his bed is a bent photo—why? Were the two of them lovers? Does it mean, where we found it, that he forgot it or lost it or intended a safekeeping? Should we attempt to make contact? What if this other man too is dead? Or alive, but doesn't want to remember, is human? Is it okay to be human, and fall away from oblation and memory, if we forget, and can't sometimes help it and sometimes it is all that we want? How long, in dawns or new cocks, does that take? What if it is rest and nothing else that we want? Is it a findable thing, small? In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe, a country? Will a guide be required who will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we swim? What will I do now, with my hands?