The Way Back

Abstract

The Way Back Carl Phillips (bio) When he takes it by the neck where the head should be, repositioning the body so the markings at the wings face up, he does it with a gesture so absolute in its refusal to give anything of feeling away, that it seems at first like a brand of precision—his own brand— and not indifference. Prairie hawk, he says, Or an owl, it's possible. He speaks like a man who knows at least a couple of things, maybe more than that, so when he says No animal—a knife did this, meaning the missing head, I believe him, in that way that the effort to believe should count as believing. Maggots negotiate what's left of it, making the feathers move very slightly, as if in a wind, a small wind... The urge to make meaning again - of everything, his gesture, the knife-work, the corrupted body, the body —rises inside of me: as if it were sexual, that's how it feels and then, like that, no less abruptly, how it falls away. —When was I last this alone, with anyone? He looks up at me in that half-looking- just-above-and- [End Page 647] to-the-left-of-me way that's probably a habit of his and, scooping the bird up in both hands, he brings it close to my face, closer, until it hurts to look as much, almost, as it hurts not to. I can smell the rot of it; I can see the bird, I can see his fingers around the bird—tight, not too tight, gentle—I can almost see to where what happens next has happened. Carl Phillips Carl Phillips, an associate editor of Callaloo, is author of seven volumes of poems, the most recent being The Tether (winner of the 2002 Kinsley Tufts Poetry Award), Rock Harbor, and The Rest of Love. He is also author of Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. This professor of English and former director of the creative writing program at Washington University (St. Louis) has also received numerous other honors for his poetry—e. g., the Lamda Literary Award, the Morse Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Copyright © 2004 Charles H. Rowell