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[Poetry]

SPIRIT LAKE
by Carl Phillips

All the several darknesses that I hated once,
though more often, lately, I row inside them,
stolen boats, blown aslant these waters…


–Gracchus, fallen hunter, in your boat called
Little Crown, O crown of Death, I don’t
forget you.  Even now, I trespass in your name.

  

PERMISSION TO SPEAK

And if I be torn?


And if torn means mendable?

And the wayward mission of your body
be a needle’s mission, up and through
my own?

                How softly the after comes
loose, unraveling, until it’s just
before: bees again in the catnip, the yarrow,
the last of those hydrangeas that I call
forgiveness, for their useless unfolding and
flowering routinely, each time as if
this time something different will be
what happens,

                         not the usual ghost of
put-aside-for-now-sorrow
disappearing, none of that
steadiness with which
he kept looking back – back at both of us, 
as he lifted away.



Carl Phillips is the author of more than eight books of poetry, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, The Rest of Love, Rock Harbor, and The Tether, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award. His collection Double Shadow won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry. Phillips teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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