#carl phillips

[havingapoemwithyou]

Regime by Carl Phillips

[sfsolstice]

Carl Phillips, from "Everything All of It," in Then The War

[soracities]

Carl Phillips, "Fixed Shadow, Moving Water", Then the War: New and Selected Poems [ID'd]

[sashayed]

Civilization

There's an art    to everything. How the rain means    April and an ongoingness like    that of song until at last it ends. A centuries-old    set of silver handbells that once an altar boy swung,    processing...You're the same    wilderness you've always been, slashing through briars,    the bracken of your invasive    self. So he said,    in a dream. But the rest of it—all the rest—    was waking: more often than not, to the next    extravagance. Two blackamoor    statues, each mirroring the other, each hoisting    forever upward his burden of hand-painted, carved-by-hand    peacock feathers. Don't    you know it, don't you know I love you, he said. He was    shaking. He said: I love you. There's an art    to everything. What I've    done with this life, what I'd meant not to do,  or would have meant, maybe, had I understood, though I have  no regrets. Not the broken but  still-flowering dogwood. Not the honey locust, either. Not even    the ghost walnut with its non-branches whose    every shadow is memory,    memory...As he said to me once, That's all garbage    down the river, now. Turning, but as the utterly lost—    because addicted—do:    resigned all over again. It only looked, it—    It must only look like leaving. There's an art    to everything. Even    turning away. How eventually even hunger    can become a space to live in. How they made    out of shamelessness something    beautiful, for as long as they could.

Carl Phillips (b. 1959) Double Shadow, 2011

[beguines]

Carl Phillips, In the Blood

[deputy-buck]

[wawamouse]

"Electric", Carl Phillips

[noleavestoblow]

"I’m made to see the world more intensely, my love for it deepens, even as my sorrow does—without which, I wouldn’t know what love is, to begin with."

-Carl Phillips