eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets
There's
a trembling inside the both of us,
there's a trembling, inside us both.
The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and "all we do is maybe all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. These are poems of searing beauty, lit by hope and shadowed by it, from a poet whose work "reinstates the possibility of finding meaning in a world that is forever ready to revoke the sources of meaning in our lives" (Jonathan Farmer, Slate).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374713393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 213 KB |
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent book of prose is The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
Reconnaissance
By Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Carl PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71339-3
CHAPTER 1
RECONNAISSANCE
All the more elegant forms of cruelty, I'm told, begin
with patience. I have practiced patience. As for piety
being, to superstition, as what had seemed a fortress
can be to not-a-fortress-in-the-end, at all: maybe so.
— Why not move like light, reflected, across the snow?
THE DARKER POWERS
Even if you're right,
and there's in fact a difference
between trouble unlooked-for, and
the kind of trouble we pursued,
ruthlessly, until at last
it was ours,
what will the difference
have been, finally? What I've
called the world continues
to pass for one, the room spins
same as ever, the bodies
inside it do, flightless, but
no less addicted to mastering —
to the dream of mastering — the very
boughs through which
they keep falling without
motion, almost,
that slowly, it seems they'll fall
forever, my
pretty consorts, to whom
sometimes — out of pity,
not mercy, for
nothing tender
about it — I show the darker
powers I've hardly shown
to anyone: Feel the weight of them,
I say, before putting them back,
just behind my heart, where they blacken
and thrive.
FOR NIGHT TO FALL
You could tell from the start that the best
were frailing. We made the wishes we made,
beside the wishes we also hoped would
come true, for there's always a difference,
the way what we remember of what happened
is just memory, not history exactly, and
not the past, which is truth, but by then
who cared? The truth by then as a snowy
owl becoming steadily more indistinguishable
from the winter sand in twilight, feathered
emptiness filling/unfilling itself for no one,
no apparent reason — who? who says?
who says the dead are farther away from me
than you are? — across the hard, hard shore.
MORALIA
The Golden Age, the Silver ... And then there's the nothing
everything returns to, flies to a bloated stag found
strangled, say, among the reeds,
the reeds where the roseate,
the thick in the head but all the lovelier for it, the lion-
muscled, graceful, syphilitic — all the lovers you've
ever had, meaning all the bodies you've variously given
sway to
or made sway — rise as one before you: not ghostly,
more like perennials you'd forgotten to expect again,
finding their way back into the violence and non-violence
of light, sunlight. They're what the light falls through.
THE GREATEST COLORS FOR THE EMPTIEST PARTS OF THE
WORLD
Sure, I used to say his name like a truth that, just
by saying it aloud, I could make more true, which
makes no more sense than having called it sorrow,
when it was only the rain making the branches hang
more heavily, so that some of them, sometimes,
even touched the ground ... I see that now. I can
see how easy it is to confuse estrangement with
what comes before that, what's really just another
form of being lost, having meant to spell out —
wordlessly, handlessly — I'm falling, not Sir,
I fell. As for emptiness spilling where no one
ever wanted it to, and becoming compassion, as
for how that happens — What if all we do is all we
can do? what if longing, annihilation, regret are all this
life's ever going to be, a little music thrown across and
under it, ghost song from a cricket box when the last
crickets have again gone silent, now, or be still forever,
as the gathering crowd, ungathering, slowly backs away?
STEEPLE
Maybe love really does mean the submission of power —
I don't know. Like pears on a branch, a shaking branch,
in sunlight, 4 o'clock sunlight, all the ways we do harm,
or refrain from it, when nothing says we have to ... Shining,
everyone shining like that, as if reality itself depended
on a nakedness as naked as naked gets; on a faith in each
other as mistaken as mistaken tends to be, though I have
loved the mistake of it — still do; even now — as I love
the sluggishness with which, like sacrifice, like the man
who, having seen, no, having understood himself at last,
turns at first away — has to — the folded black-and-copper
wings of history begin their deep unfolding, the bird itself,
shuddering, lifts up into the half-wind that comes after —
higher — soon desire will resemble most that smaller thing,
late affection, then the memory of it; and then nothing at all.
SINCE YOU ASK
It's as if forgiveness were, in fact, an animal — wild,
like animals, the particular wild of animals that have
lived domesticated their entire lives, when a hand,
a trigger, something small lets go. All I can hear
most nights is the howling, even if, sometimes, sure,
I forget to think about it — if I don't think about it,
the dark's pieces briefly come back together, they
lift as one and, like a swarm of bees, thick, ungainly,
in slow reverse, the dark clears. They say one cloud
must pass eventually, from beneath the other — and
I have learned it must: didn't intimacy mean courtesy,
once, and force mean power? I'll shout the starlings
loose from the pines again. I swim the field — stitches
everywhere, your body everywhere, blue cornflowers.
CAPELLA
I
I miss the sea.
I miss the storms
that stopped there.
How much is luck, again opening,
and luck shutting itself down, what we
never expected, or only sort of did,
or should have?
The windfalls of my mistakes sweetly rot beneath me.
Two hawks lift — headed north — from my highest bough.
II
So he's seen the blizzard that the future
looks like, and gotten lost,
a little. All the same —
he gathers the honeysuckle in his arms,
as for a lover. Cloud of bees,
of yellow.
His chest, blurring bright with it.
Who's to say brutality's what he'll be wearing,
when he goes?
III
There's a light that estrangement,
more often than not, briefly
leaves behind it.
Then the dark — blue and damned,
erotic: here, where — done at last
with flashing like
power itself at first, then what power
comes to — the field
lays down its winded swords. — My head;
beside yours.
CHROMATIC BLACK
Of the many things that he used to say to me, there are two
I'm certain of: You taste like a last less-than-long summer afternoon
by the shore just before September; and
You're the kind of betrayal, understand, I've been waiting for,
all my life. When did remembering stop meaning
to be lit from within — bodily —
and the mind, briefly flickering
again out — wasn't that forgetting? Somewhere
abandon's still just a word to be turned away from, as from a man
on fire. Remorse, I think,
is not regret. How new, as in full of chance, the nights here
still can seem to be,
if you keep your eyes closed. Here's a lullaby:
"No more bondage, no triumph, either, no more the bluing waves
of shame ..."
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.
DISCIPLINE
More theatrically than I'd expected,
the trapped hummingbird won't stop
beating the mason jar's glass.
The staghorn sumac's
splayed geometry
tilts on the wind.
You are the knife,
and you are also what the knife
has opened, says the wind.
FOR LONG TO HOLD
Not because there was nothing to say, or we
didn't want to — we just stopped speaking
entirely, but like making a gift of it: Here;
for you. Saturday birds picked the sidewalk's
reminders of Friday night's losses, what got left
behind. I've been wrong about more than, despite
memory, I had thought was possible. I keep
making my way through the so-called forests of the so-
called dead, I whistle their branches into rivers
elsewhere, they tell the usual lies that water, lately,
can hardly wait to begin singing about: love as
rescue, rescue as to have been at last set free. If
that's how it always seems anyway, so what,
that it did? When I whistle again — not so hard
this time, more softly — each lie blows out, then
away: lit candles; dust. — I take everything back.
STAMINA
— Wild West? Colorless birds
lift up from the snarl and
tangle of chaparral. Twice
I've known the speed of love
to exactly equal the speed of
life itself. Not so much
the saguaro's predictability,
but the more ignorable
vegetation. All the smaller
varieties of almost that, before
living without them, we thought
we'd die without. In these parts,
reptilian, autoerotic, that's
how the winter works, when it
comes, if it does come. I keep
a space for tenderness. The Wild
West isn't dead yet, it seems,
no; only harder to find. Is it
any wonder — were we not
a wonder — seeing how the skies here,
how they give everything away too soon?
THE LENGTH OF THE FIELD
In the stories it's different: grief,
like the dark, lifts eventually —
an abandonment inside which, with all
the clarity of bells when for once they
ring like nothing but the ringing bells
they are, it can seem that at last you've
gotten away with something, like
a horse you've stolen that, now, lighter
than ash on a sudden wind, or any wind
at all, takes the length of the field, but
as if bewildered almost, any man
for whom to have trusted too easily
has merely meant disappointment,
not disaster, and the long
longing-in-vain for that moment when
either one could have been the other
starts to stir a little, slowly it unfurls itself,
its languorous disease, inside him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reconnaissance by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2015 Carl Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
RECONNAISSANCE,
THE DARKER POWERS,
FOR NIGHT TO FALL,
MORALIA,
THE GREATEST COLORS FOR THE EMPTIEST PARTS OF THE WORLD,
STEEPLE,
SINCE YOU ASK,
CAPELLA,
CHROMATIC BLACK,
PERMISSION TO SPEAK,
DISCIPLINE,
FOR LONG TO HOLD,
STAMINA,
THE LENGTH OF THE FIELD,
THE BURIED LIFE,
AFTER LEARNING THAT THE SPELL IS IRREVERSIBLE,
FROM A LAND CALLED NEAR-IS-FAR,
CORRECTION,
SPIRIT LAKE,
IN WHICH TO WONDER FLEW A KIND OF RECKONING,
LOWISH HUM, COOL FUSS,
LAST NIGHT,
FOLIAGE,
THE STRONG BY THEIR STILLNESS,
THUNDER,
FAINTLY, WITH FALLING STARS,
DELICATELY, SLOW, THE WORLD COMES BACK,
ENOUGH, TOM FOOL, NOW SLEEP,
MEANWHILE, AND ANYWAY,
HARNESS,
SHIELD,
AT BAY,
SPRING,
BY FORCE,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Also by Carl Phillips,
Copyright,