civilization

There's an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoingness like
that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing...You're the same
wilderness you've always

been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So he said,
in a dream. But

the rest of it—all the rest—
was waking: more often
than not, to the next
extravagance. Two blackamoor
statues, each mirroring

the other, each hoisting
forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
peacock feathers. Don't
you know it, don't you know

I love you, he said. He was
shaking. He said:
I love you. There's an art
to everything. What I've
done with this life,

what I'd meant not to do,
or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
no regrets. Not the broken but
still-flowering dogwood. Not

the honey locust, either. Not even
the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
every shadow is memory,
memory...As he said to me

once, That's all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
because addicted—do:
resigned all over again. It

only looked, it—
It must only look
like leaving. There's an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How

eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in. How they made
out of shamelessness something
beautiful, for as long as they could.

by Carl Phillips


the pages lie wasted behind my fingers. the glue, the pencil, the pen. looks like a house, looks like a dress, looks like the caves on the interior of the human heart. sounds like, brain. the edge of a syllable tilting towards something else. you wanted this, i remind the mirror and paint the face on for other eyes, dodged like lighting bolts or a rejected fate-- she said, i don't want to die here, and i said, ill only ever die in myself. and i could tell, that even from far away, my silent whisper was also yours and the small breath of air gliding by your ear then, two weeks later, was unmistakably mine. in the paper house, every wall is the turning page that you might have read before, or even written. and this dress in the rain is reduced to nakedness, a tear, the pearl of a body that drops, and splashes, like so much water poured into a glass, and swallowed.