Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us, and: Don’t

Abstract

Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us, and: Don’t Carl Phillips (bio) Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us A water-meadow is not a flood-meadow.A working meadow’s not a fallow field.Heartbreak like a bloodhound better off abandoned because untamable.There’s a slant of light I used to call Self Portrait as a Lion, Bringing Down a Stag. [End Page 203] Don’t Though the city itself has long since beensmashed up and plundered for anything leftworth plundering, the walls that surrounded itstand unbroken, still, as if war — like time,technically — didn’t really exist. Can time exist, if it’sjust an understanding? For animals, to rise to the huntat nightfall, to lie sated by dawn — is that time? Peoplebuilt walls around cities long ago, to protect the city. Butthe walls, though they announce, or suggest at least,that there’s a city behind them, make of the cityitself — of the various lives that any cityequals — a secret, finally. So, to protect becomes alsoto make secret. To protect, to wall in, to makeunfindable, as sometimes dignity, I suppose,requires, as in “And the queen gave birthto the minotaur, half bull, half man, half monster,half shame, and they housed it at the centerof a tall maze.” For what’s a maze if not a wall [End Page 204] with too many twists in it, complete with dead endswhere it had seemed for sure they must leadsomeplace . . . Don’t do this. You, for whom sleepall but depended upon story, I’ve looked everywhere,every mirror: smell of seascape, children’s voicesthrough a fog that must lift eventually,and all I’ve got for you is myth — a kind of story,the kind that blows off of history to explain history,as if that were the kinder way, because less intimate, lesscapable of hurt, therefore, though it be most cruel. [End Page 205] Carl Phillips Carl Phillips’s new book, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, will be out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2020. Sibling Rivalry Press will publish his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures, this fall. Copyright © 2019 The University of the South