The Rest of Love: Poems - Softcover

Phillips, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374529620 ISBN 13: 9780374529628

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . . outstrips all diversionary maneuvers." (Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review)

The light, for as far as
I can see, is that of any number of late

afternoons I remember still: how the light
seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living
insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about

that one clear note it gives.
--from "Late Apollo III"

In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual.

The Rest of Love is a 2004 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Rest of Love

By Carl Phillips

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 2005 Carl Phillips
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374529628

Chapter One

CUSTOM

There is a difference it used to make,seeing three swans in this versus four in thatquadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as itseffects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-departure; or,about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kindof choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhereto be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,something that could know better, and should, therefore-but does not:a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice-an instinct for it, or a habit at first, thatbecomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we haveof what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those saintson whom the birds once settled freely.

TOWER WINDOW

The glass is old:through it, the world-its parts-coming up:is it spring then?

To look through it,I could be looking throughriver-water, the riverslowing butnever down, quite, tostillness-

I had thought so,I had wanted to think so.Was that wrong, then?

Last night, the storm washours approaching.Too far, still, to be heard.Only the sky, when lit-less flashing thanquivering brokenly

(a wing,not any wing,a sparrow's)-for a sign.

It seemed exactly the wayI've loved you.

And you a stone,marked Gone Already-youa leaf,marked Spattered Milk

in that light, then out of.

I closed my eyes. Idreamed again the dreamcalled Yes: the worstis true.In it,I wake.I lean my head against the glass.How cool the glass is.

LATE, IN A TIME OF SPLENDOR

All day, I've watched it, the bluehydrangea's tossing shadow. The only pattern isthat it changes; routinely, what was-gets lost.There was one whose eyes, fromcertain angles, seemeddifferent depths of the samemistake. Another who, during sex, would shoutThe will of God, as if brandishinga flag whose meaning-consolation,triumph-I never required.As when to believe in a thingcan be, andthen must become, enough. What if,about desire, it won't have matteredhow I saw it-lifting, like a bodynot yet steady from that firstunsteadying breakin dream: for a moment, all bells ring true.

TROPHY

I.

When was the burningthat of fire?

When was it fear?

When sorrow?

That any gesture can be understoodas the necessary, mostly incidentalprice the body paysfor whatever response comes

past gesture,

past the body that made it:

to what extent can this be said, andit be true? andit be false?Under what conditions?

Under whose conditions?

Thus the waves.Thus the light of the sunacross them.

II.

Above me, what before had seemedentirely that to which my own passage-swift,coracled, resplendent, overthe water-might stand compared

are clouds now,

now interruption,

the way that water is interruption,the land only endingapparently,

there, where not so long agoI pushed off from it,

it does not end ...

It seems I am rowing,

it seemsto the rhythm ofa song there's nothingleft of

except the rhythm,

no notes,

a broken line, the words, to-guessing-sing to, No, singNo, I'll have no other-

Say what you will.

Say all you have to.

I have looked to the water:there it was, of course, doingthe water's version of pucker, thenbloom,then sprawl.

I look to the shore as iftoward everything that, once,I stood for, and-how soon, already-

almost, I cannot see it, I

look to the water,

I am rowing, it seems

SINGING

Overheard,late, this morning: Don't blameme, if I am everything your hearthas led to.

Hazel trees;ghost-moths in the hazel branches.Why not stay?

It's a dream I've hadtwice now: God is real, asthe difference betweenhaving squandered faith and having lost itis real. He's straightforward:

when he says Look at me when I'm speaking,it means he's speaking.He's not unreasonable:

because I've asked, he shows me his mercy-a complicated arrangementof holes and

hooks, buckles. What else did you thinkmercy looked like,

he says and, demonstrating, he straps it on, then takes it off.

THE REST OF LOVE

The hive is for wherethe honey was.Was findable there,

then not.Sometimes, I think I dreamed it,or I am saying it like a thing

that I would do,when I would never,and calling it art:

that first time;that second time ...That's how it starts-

I know as much about mythologyas, by now,you must also. The bull

for slaughter; the number of daysrequired for the carcass to rotcorrectly-

so that eventually, the bees come back,lifting the dropped veil ofthemselves up,

into the air, like somedark and obviousexception to a rule

I once knew. Is it true thatnothing lacks, giventhe right comparison,

its charm?In the story,it is difficult to say

whether Orpheus is stupid,or is heartless, or-what,human?

He looks back.He's lost everything.

And his own story begins in earnest.

VOW

Unpatterned rustling,the kinds of trees-pine,scrub oak-you'll haveseen before.

Is it latchless, or onlyunlatched,that door,slamming?

By disarray,I mean the look findablein the eyes of a horse in storm,and panicking.

What I mean by luster:look,see the black of its mane?

Thunder,a lasso coming close, thatjust misses.

Manured hay bales;dirt the damp has kept,days now,from traveling far.

As far as conquest?No. Not that far.

As far as the urge torise and begin conquering? No,

farther.Incongruities.Tiger lilies-little slaves, little

slaves in the light-as an example. Wordsto a childhood songI'd thought forgotten, but

parts come back. I lie down.I wear nothing at all.

LIKE STITCHES WHERE THE MOTHSHAVE MADE AN OPENING

Star-in-the-hand Cupped fire Fist,luminous. What keeps staying lost is not,anymore, the thing itself, but the definitionit once provided, as history does to whatoccurs-to what has not, yet. Leafe-gold, what isblown-is blowable-away. God enters meas if from behind; he shakes, inside me. I wantwhat you want, he says. I say Why regard what Ican't choose? To be anchorless, but not unanchored:To have failed means, at worst, once we flourished,that's right, isn't it? Windfall whose imperfectionsfade in a shabby harvest, the body-as again frommistakes all the same enjoyed-lifts, staggers,like light off spokes of a wheel set spinning, as the wheelslows down: speed of legend, of the myth that follows,of the life that a myth eclipses. Speed of Don't.Not now. Listen: someone is calling my name.

LATE APOLLO

I.

Brief in the light of streetlamp, then back again,into dark-two boys, throwing a ball between them.The younger one is almost handsome, a staralready, going down. At last the snow liesunoracular,

unstepped across. If I could speak, I'd speakto no one, now. I'd remember the way everyoneelse does: later, when none of it matters,memory as good as a mirror for changing things,no good at all:

You're in a garden,you've trellised the dwarf cherry, trained it so as,branching, to become-and cast in shadow against the wall-this fan, opening, held open, the way a map is heldin wind-

The map makes the getting thereat first look easy: a prairie, then the mountains, then the sea.

II.

And now it is as we wanted it.And now they are very still:

the grapes, rampant once; the roses that-like grace-require no trainingto swag and scramble; the waters there ...

A stillness like that of music resting-or sex,after: what they call sadness, though itis not sadness.

Country to which, increasingly, I'vefelt native. I believeI could-

Like asking at first Where am Iafter dream-and the room, in pieces, slow,comes back: a language that, all this time, we knew.

Here comes the word for mystery.Here is the word for true.

III.

As if everything were in the effect, finally.Less the wind itself, than a quickness,or lack of it, with which the gulls, lifting,

move forward; or how the trees, here atshoreline, recall or don't the startled angleof retreat-before-temptation that is fixed,

apparently, instinctive in the saint-this ishow, in the old, illuminated paintings,the saints most easily can be picked out

from the crowd around them, the crowdwhose purpose, I think, must be to remind usthat the world is larger, will always be larger

than its exceptions. The crowd equalswhat's forgettable. The light, for as far asI can see, is that of any number of late

afternoons I remember still: how the lightseemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been livinginside it, waiting-I'd heard all about

that one clear note it gives.

MASTERY

Dry waterfall

that eventually, almost,the skull resembled-

And then the skull was just

a skull. The heart-at last nothing

but a muscle moving,

not at all the talisman you'd imagined:how if only you could touch it-howeverything, everything might

yet be differentif you did ... Is thisperfection,

or the cost of it?

If the mind seems

increasingly a landscapewhere brush and desert, dryprairie, and chaparralcoincide,

is this that landscape,or the abandonedset, finally, for one of those movies

that take place there: sudden

sandstorm, each manimmediately dismounting, each blinding,with whatever cloth available,

his horse's eyes ...

That much, still,is true, isn't it?-the horse

comes first? then you do?

ALL IT TAKES

Any force-generosity, sudden updraft.Fear. Things invisible,

and the visible effects by whichwe know them. Human gesture. Betrayed,betrayed. The dampness of fog as

understandable by how, inside it, from within theirthicket of nowhere left to hide-that leafless-the winter berries, more than usual,

shine. First alwayscomes the ability to believe, and then the need to.The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they

made of love a wild god; of fidelity-a small,a tame one. I am no less grateful forthe berries than for the thorns that are

meant, I think, to help. As ifsometimes the world really did amount toa quiet arrangement. Cut flowers. Make

death the one whose eyes are lidless. And-already-you are leaving. You havecrossed the water.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Rest of Loveby Carl Phillips Copyright © 2005 by Carl Phillips. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374529620
• ISBN 13: 9780374529628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80