Carl Phillips

       By then the point of the forest was the getting through it.

Then it lay behind them, all but its sharper details—flies licking at

dried blood, I think, on a random tree stump—getting swiftly lost,

its muffled birdsong, too, that had come less, it seemed, from

the trees than from beneath, mostly, as if somewhere deep,

deep inside the earth. Maybe meeting you has been

the one good reason I lasted so long in a world that must

eventually not include me, I almost said to him. Past the forest,

the shore, where the land ended, where briefly the waves hitting it

seemed the latest example of how squandering momentum can

become routine; while, upon the waves, the taken-for-grantedness

of shadow play seemed its own example: how one way to prove power

can be to quietly assume it. Then except for offshore, where the dark lay

like—defiantly—a ship at anchor, everything was itself. As it always

had been. They took off their shoes, their clothes.

They swam out to the dark ship.

In the east country where I must have lived once,

or how else remember it, the words came falling to

every side of me, words from a life that I’d thought,

if not easy, might at least be possible, though that

was then: little crown and little burst of arrows

and ritual, loyalty, they are not the same . . . I lay

rippling like a field shot through with amethyst

and reason. Then it seemed I myself was the field,

the words fell toward, then into me, each one no

sooner getting understood, than it touched the ground.

Squalor of leaves. November. A lone

hornets’ nest. Paper wasps. Place where

everything that happens is as who says it will,

because. As in Why shouldn’t we have

come to this, why not, this far, this

close to

        that below-zero where we almost

forget ourselves, rise at last unastonished

at the wreckery of it, what the wreckage

somedays can seem all along to have

been mostly, making you wonder what fear

is for, what prayer is, if not the first word

and not the last one either, if it changes

nothing of what you are still, black stars,

black

        scars, crossing a field that you’ve

crossed before, holding on, tight, though

careful, for you must be careful, so easily

torn is the veil diminishment comes

down to as it lifts and falls, see it falling,

now it lifts again, why do we love, at all?