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drop the bird whole—dead,

  undamaged,

  mercy—

  from her mouth. And want no more.

  MINOTAUR

  What stalked the room was never envy.

  Is not regret, anymore,

  nor fail. We are

  —discovered:

  we resemble hardly

  ever those birds now, noising but

  not showing from their double

  cloisters—

  leaves,

  fog.

  I miss them.

  I forget what I wanted to

  mean to you.

  I forget what I

  meant to give to you, that I haven’t.

  Ménage.

  You, in sleep still,

  the dog restless, wanting

  out, like a dream of the body caught

  shining inside a struggling whose

  end it cannot know will be

  no good one.

  Outside, the basil shoots to flower; the neighbors’

  burro, loose, astray, has

  found the flowers, his

  head enters and tilts

  up from the angle confusable with

  sorrow,

  adoration. His hooves pass

  —like God doing, for now,

  no damage to them—

  the heirloom tomatoes: Beam’s Yellow Pear,

  Russian Black,

  Golden Sunray, what sweetness once

  looked like, how it tasted

  commonly.

  All that time.

  I have held faces lovelier—lovelier, or

  as fair.

  They make sense

  eventually. Your own begins to:

  fervor of a man

  cornered; unuseful tenderness with which,

  to the wound it won’t survive, the animal

  puts its tongue.

  HALO

  In the dream, as if to remind

  himself of his own power—that he

  does have some—the gelding

  whinnies once,

  once more, at

  nothing passing.

  If this were song, I’d call it Someone

  Waving from Across the Water

  at Someone Else

  Not Waving Back,

  but it is dream. You, speaking; and I

  distracted as usual

  from the words, this time by

  how you speak them;

  the way tuberoses open,

  or new leafage—

  slow, instinctive; sexual

  vaguely.

  There is little I’ve not done for you.

  There are questions.

  There are answers I do not give.

  Between the sometimes terrible

  (because leaving us always) fact

  of the body to which we’re

  each, each moment, eroded

  down—between our bodies

  and the pattern the light,

  dreamlight, is making on them,

  the effect is one of trade routes

  long since confused by time, war,

  a forgetfulness, or

  because here, and here, as from

  much handling, the map

  especially has gone soft:

  wind as a face gone red with blowing,

  oceans whose end is broken stitchery—

  swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,

  shimmer-and-coil, invitation … You know

  the kind of map I mean. Countries as

  distant as they are believable,

  than which—to find,

  to cross—I am not

  more difficult. Here I am, I say,

  wanting to help,

  Over here. And you turn. And

  on its axis—swift,

  inexorable as luck—the dream, turning,

  with you …

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which the poems in this volume first appeared:

  Boston Review: “The Deposition”

  Callaloo: “Golden,” “Quarter-view, from Nauset,” “Interlude,” “Moving Target,” “The Clearing”

  Daedalus: “The Use of Force”

  Field: “Canoe”

  Green Mountains Review: “Entry,” “Those Parts That Rescue Looked Like”

  The Harvard Advocate: “To Speak of It Now”

  Indiana Review: “The Silver Age,” “Minotaur”

  The Kenyon Review: “As a Blow, from the West”

  Kestrel: “Loose Hinge”

  LIT: “Blue Shoulder,” “Cavalry”

  Michigan Quarterly Review: “Rock Harbor,” “Return to the Land of the Golden Apples”

  Mid-American Review: “The Threshing,” “To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness”

  New England Review: “The Clarity,” “Justice”

  The New Republic: “Flight”

  Parnassus: Poetry in Review: “To Break, to Ride,” “Trade,” “Via Sacra”

  The Progressive: “Corral”

  Seneca Review: “Ravage,” “Halo”

  The Threepenny Review: “Fretwork”

  Tikkun: “By Hard Stages”

  “The Clearing” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 (Robert Hass and David Lehman, editors), Scribner, 2001.

  “Fretwork” also appeared in The Best American Poetry 2002 (Robert Creeley and David Lehman, editors), Scribner, 2002.

  “Moving Target” also appeared in the Signature Series of the Catskills Poetry Workshop, Catskills Ltd. Edition, 2000.

  “Spoken Part, for Countertenor Voice” appeared as a Dia Foundation Broadside, 2000.

  “To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness” also appeared in Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses (Bill Henderson, editor), Pushcart Press, 2002.

  The epigraph comes from Royce’s The World and the Individual. All thanks to my friend and colleague Naomi Lebowitz, for leading me there.

  ALSO BY CARL PHILLIPS

  In the Blood

  Cortège

  From the Devotions

  Pastoral

  The Tether

  CARL PHILLIPS

  Rock Harbor

  CARL PHILLIPS is the author of six books of poems, including The Tether (FSG, 2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2002, and From the Devotions, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2001, he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 2002 by Carl Phillips

  All rights reserved

  Published in 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First paperback edition, 2003

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  Paperback ISBN 0-374-52885-3

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466880085

  First eBook edition: August 2014