Rock Harbor

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  Golden

  Quarter-view, from Nauset

  Interlude

  Moving Target

  Corral

  As a Blow, from the West

  The Clearing

  The Deposition

  TWO

  By Hard Stages

  The Clarity

  Loose Hinge

  The Threshing

  The Silver Age

  To Break, to Ride

  Entry

  THREE

  Blue Shoulder

  Spoken Part, for Countertenor Voice

  Rock Harbor

  FOUR

  Trade

  To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness

  Cavalry

  To Speak of It Now

  Those Parts That Rescue Looked Like

  Via Sacra

  The Use of Force

  FIVE

  Return to the Land of the Golden Apples

  Flight

  Fretwork

  Ravage

  Canoe

  Justice

  Minotaur

  Halo

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Carl Phillips

  About the Author

  Copyright

  for Doug Macomber,

  for Ellen Bryant Voigt,

  and to my parents

  Were there then no longing in time, there would be no peace in eternity.

  JOSIAH ROYCE

  ONE

  GOLDEN

  There, behind the raised

  and extended

  wing to which

  no bird

  no fiend

  no haloing is

  attached: two bodies,

  fucking. It is difficult

  to see, but that much—

  from the way, with great

  then greater

  effort, their mouths

  seem half to recall or

  want to

  a song even older,

  holier than the one they

  fill with—I can

  guess. The rest,

  I know: that it’s dream;

  that, in dream,

  to know a thing is to

  have a gift and

  not to, especially. Like

  refusing to prove what

  anyway all scrutable

  signs point to. Stopped

  trees are the least of it,

  the still standing

  but decidedly aslant

  version of unanimous,

  what looks at

  first like approbation;

  then—like trees,

  and how a wind will

  pass through. To turn

  with and not

  against it

  no more means

  the wind is with us than

  the gods are. I don’t

  believe each gets what

  each deserves.

  QUARTER-VIEW, FROM NAUSET

  Love, etc. Have been remembering

  the part in Sophocles

  where a god advises the two heroes

  they should be as

  twin lions, feeding—how

  even the flesh of late

  slaughter does not

  distract them from keeping

  each over the other

  a guarding eye.

  What part of this is love, and

  what survival

  is never said,

  though the difference it makes is

  at least that between a lily and, say,

  a shield. I think of you

  often, especially here,

  at the edge of the world or a

  part of it, anyway,

  by which I mean of course

  more, you will have guessed, than

  the coast, just now, I

  stand on. Against it,

  the water dashes with

  the violence of two men who,

  having stripped it, now take for their

  own the body of

  a third man on the bad

  sofa of an even worse

  motel room in what eventually

  is movie—one

  we’ve seen … The way

  what looks like rape

  might not be. You’d like

  the light here. At

  times, a color you’d call anything but blue.

  INTERLUDE

  Briefly, an ease

  akin to those parts of

  the air that

  allow the bird respite from

  the effort of muscle

  flight entails.

  As I said: briefly.

  It does not matter, I

  understand now, my having

  hoped in no way to

  resemble anyone—

  this, the reason

  why the difficulty, I have

  often been sure, with

  death will be less

  the dying than the having been

  finally always like

  everyone else; that

  particular

  humiliation: to admit

  as much.

  Very briefly, it

  seems now.

  In the manner of happiness

  or an only-half-grounded

  fear or whatever

  else can at once

  be both pressing and

  ignorable, until—as when

  the evidence has grown

  embarrassing, so why

  shouldn’t we, let us

  throw it away—until it is

  like that and, soon, it

  is that. We’ll assume again

  our new positions: myself, at

  last arcing

  the body

  over. —Up. Into yours.

  MOVING TARGET

  If to be patient were less

  an exercise

  and more a name to be worn, say,

  in the middle—

  that he might wear it—

  Of the linen sash to

  his robe, of linen,

  that his hands have

  fashioned a knot such that

  the knot suggests now a dragonfly in

  flight from what is harmless and

  not, entirely—

  that he might, if at all, know this

  only as when without understanding it

  we know we have and have come to

  expect we shall have always

  upon others

  an effect we do not

  intend—

  His face:

  a face, turning. And

  then a turned one.

  CORRAL

  for Percival Everett

  Fleetingly, the mule is neither

  justice nor injustice, but

  another muscled

  abbreviation in which

  right and wrong take in

  each other no apparent

  interest, as if—impossible, on

  purpose—to remind how

  not everything is

  vengeance, not everything

  wants reason. The mule

  intends nothing of the contrast he

  makes inevitably

  in a field otherwise all

  horses: five of them, four

  standin
g around and nosing

  the only one whose flesh, white

  entirely, lacks pattern, unless

  the light counts,

  the only one not standing,

  lying with the particular

  stillness of between when

  a death has occurred

  already and when we

  ourselves shall have

  learned of it. Until then,

  that which before was

  patternless and not standing

  stands up, white, patterned

  by the countable light,

  the five horses step

  into then just past a shy

  gallop, the mule

  among them, then beside them,

  the mule falling in time behind

  slightly, not like defeat—don’t

  think it—like, instead one who,

  understanding (as a mule

  cannot) in full the gravity

  of the truth always that he carries

  with him, can

  afford to pity

  honestly a glamour that

  extends even to the legs, classical,

  on which each horse for now outruns the mule.

  AS A BLOW, FROM THE WEST

  Names for the moon:

  Harvest; and Blue; and

  Don’t Touch Me—

  and Do. I dreamed I had

  made a home on the side

  of a vast, live volcano,

  that the rest was water,

  that I was one among many of

  no distinction: we but

  lived there, like so many

  birds that, given the chance

  not to fly for once in

  formation, won’t take it, or

  cannot, or—or—but

  what of choice can a bird know?

  Down the volcano’s sides,

  in the pose of avalanche

  except frozen, and so

  densely it seemed impossible

  they should not strangle

  one another—yet they

  did not—grew all

  the flowers whose names

  I’d meant to master;

  it was swift, the dream—so

  much, still, to catch

  up to—though I could not

  have known that, of course,

  then: isn’t it only in

  the bracing and first wake of

  loss that we guess most cleanly

  the speed with which what held us

  left us? In the dream, the world

  was birdless, lit, yielding, it

  seemed safe, which is not to say

  you weren’t in it. You were, but

  changed somewhat, not so much

  a man of few words,

  more the look of one who

  —having entered willfully

  some danger, having just returned

  from it—chooses instead

  of words his body as

  the canvas across which to

  wordlessly broadcast his coming

  through. We lived

  in a manner that—if it

  didn’t suggest an obliviousness

  to a very real and always-there

  danger—I would call heady;

  it was not that. Think,

  rather, of the gods: how,

  if they do in fact know

  everything, they must understand

  also they will be eventually

  overthrown by a new order,

  which is at worst a loss

  of power, but not of life,

  as the gods know it. I was

  not, that is, without

  ambition: the illicit, in

  particular, I would make it

  my business to have studied;

  and of that which is gained

  easily, to want none

  of it. Flowers; names

  for the moon. It was

  swift, the dream, the body

  a wordless and stalled

  avalanche that, since forgivable—

  if I could—I would forgive, poor

  live but flagging, dying now

  volcano. And the water

  around its sides receding with

  a dream’s swiftness: everywhere,

  soon, sand and sand, a desert that,

  because there was no water,

  and because they missed it,

  the natives had called a sea, and

  to the sea had given a name:

  Friendship, whose literal

  translation in the country of

  dream is roughly “that which

  all love evolves

  down to”—

  Until to leave, or

  try to—and have drowned

  trying—becomes refrain,

  the one answer each time

  to whatever question:

  what was the place called?

  what was the house like?

  what was it we did inside it?

  how is it possible that it cannot be enough to have given

  up to you now the dream as—for a time, remember—I did give

  my truest self? why won’t you take it—if a gift, if yours?

  THE CLEARING

  Had the light

  changed, possibly—or,

  differently, was that how I’d

  seen it

  always, and not

  looking? Was I meant for

  a vessel? Did I only

  believe so and,

  so, for a time, was it true but

  only in that space which belief makes

  for its own wanting?

  What am I going to

  do with you

  —Who just

  said that?

  Whose the body—where—that voice

  belongs to?

  Might I turn,

  toward it, whinny

  into it?

  My life

  a water,

  or a cure for

  that which no water

  can cure?

  His chest

  a forest, or a lush

  failure—

  Even now, shall I choose? Do I

  get to?

  Dearest-once-to-me

  Dearest-still-to-me

  Have I chosen

  already,

  or is choice a thing

  hovering yet, an

  intention therefore, from

  which, though

  late, could I hurry back?

  What am I going to do with you— or

  how?

  Whom for?

  If stay my hand—where

  rest it?

  THE DEPOSITION

  Whether it more was like

  the ocean,

  or more

  those plates in the earth that

  shift abruptly according to

  laws that, even if I

  give to them here

  no name, apply

  nevertheless outside, in

  spite of—

  I forget,

  as so many somewhere always have

  just said. Exaggeration,

  to say I never thought

  I’d lie among them; more exactly: I

  had not hoped to. How

  brief, comparatively

  at least, that

  feathered phase—

  less Roman,

  more Greek, more

  birch than

  ash, none of shame’s

  nobility attached, but—

  worse—the embarrassing

  thud of blunder, to

  ever have laid

  the blue-to-black,

  black,

  then blue

  familiar of self full-length

  and down, ringside, as if there’d been

  a ring, or as if by

  long traveling at last done

  in, as who would

  not be? I

 
had not guessed it.

  As when to find a stone

  is to find revealed

  no truth unless the truth

  of stones, which

  is to say the fact of

  themselves only. Or

  as when the song

  of wanting is understood as

  not at all the song of

  being wanted,

  not like thirst,

  not like hunger,

  not the disappointment

  of only the one leaf gone

  vermilion inside of

  the tree’s saffron majority,

  not a godlessness in

  the wake of a habit of prayer, neither

  that sort of wind, nor a tunnel, or through one, it

  was not like that.

  TWO

  BY HARD STAGES

  All the glories—

  ribbed, and

  separate,

  collective

  sway-in-the-wind.

  Shut them.

  To have wanted

  more, where has that

  carried me,

  if what

  so much matters

  now can be proven

  later to all

  along have been doomed

  not to?

  •

  The governing

  drift was from

  sensation to

  distraction to

  irrelevance: “they came

  to nothing,” it says here,

  “en route

  settling for things like

  heat falling mostly

  against, light mainly

  falling, between them

  a bush or

  a skull

  shimmering like another

  example of absence of

  will—with

  heat only,

  shivering—”

  •

  Do I make

  a difference? or

  What is it

  so persuades, I

  must make one?

  The text breaks like a road

  forking where none

  warned of …

  Look at yourself,

  Look at you.

  Have I not

  looked there—

  possibility for

  —into it?

  How small,

  •

  without effort almost,

  can be the leap from

  it-is-findable to

  we-have-found-it.

  Though not water,

  not the flash, even,

  as if off of that which

  could be water, could

  also not be—

  To have

  called it water. “They

  crossed themselves,

  they gave

  utterly themselves over

  to what

  wasn’t there,

  that it might

  save, or drown them…”

  THE CLARITY

  No dream—but as

  if so, moving at first

  with the force of