Carl Phillips

Shadow-Land

To pass
steadily, patient, ever-wanting out of
one darkness, and into a next one, and again
out: so a life is made -- not the worst one;
perhaps the only one, around which
what had looked original or like some
chance-of-escape
exception has been so much ringing
of changes on a theme
we’ve heard. Who can say? But this time the dark
is more dark than any I’ve known
before, and I’ve know many. At each, I’ve taken
leave as if leave-taking were itself
souvenir -- as, in the end, it seems, it
will have had to be. The rest may as well

be writ on memory even I wouldn’t trust
too far, not as
unwaveringly, at leat, as I trust
my ability to make distinctions that
still matter, here, if only to me: the openness
I call the sea is not that openness that I once called
ocean, for example; or
there’s a distance, a very real one, between
granting to no one especially and
withholding from all concerned parties equally
one’s body first, then something less
tangible, not tangible at all, that
somehow counts more. One saw that, one
eventually came to . . . There’s a cover-of-night
part of me,

inside me, that remembers exactly how I became
-- what I’ve become. A silence falls there,
in that darkness, sometimes like a first falling
crop of snow, sometimes like the reverse
of when the singer, having found
the one note at last worth holding onto, begins
lifting it; and the crowd, whose gift it is -- no, whose
best instinct is
to know a gift when it hears one -- follows,
as a crowd is meant to. There are rules. They were
there from the start. There are those who,
when they love a thing, must break it first, in order that
the beloved require them
more absolutely, don’t you know me
by now?

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