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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878938 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 200 KB |
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of six previous books of poems, including Rock Harbor and The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, he 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
The Rest of Love
By Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2004 Carl PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7893-8
CHAPTER 1
Sanctum
CUSTOM
There is a difference it used to make,
seeing three swans in this versus four in that
quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its
effects 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 kind
of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to 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, that
becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have
of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those saints
on 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 through
river-water, the river
slowing but
never down, quite, to
stillness —
I had thought so,
I had wanted to think so.
Was that wrong, then?
Last night, the storm was
hours approaching.
Too far, still, to be heard.
Only the sky, when lit —
less flashing than
quivering brokenly
(a wing,
not any wing,
a sparrow's) — for a sign.
It seemed exactly the way
I've loved you.
And you a stone,
marked Gone Already —
you
a leaf,
marked Spattered Milk
in that light, then out of.
I closed my eyes. I
dreamed again the dream
called Yes: the worst
is 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 blue
hydrangea's tossing shadow. The only pattern is
that it changes; routinely, what was —
gets lost.
There was one whose eyes, from
certain angles, seemed
different depths of the same
mistake. Another who, during sex, would shout
The will of God, as if brandishing
a flag whose meaning — consolation,
triumph — I never required.
As when to believe in a thing
can be, and
then must become, enough. What if,
about desire, it won't have mattered
how I saw it — lifting, like a body
not yet steady from that first
unsteadying break
in dream: for a moment, all bells ring true.
TROPHY
I.
When was the burning
that of fire?
When was it fear?
When sorrow?
That any gesture can be understood
as the necessary, mostly incidental
price the body pays
for whatever response comes
past gesture,
past the body that made it:
to what extent can this be said, and
it be true? and
it be false?
Under what conditions?
Under whose conditions?
Thus the waves.
Thus the light of the sun
across them.
II.
Above me, what before had seemed
entirely that to which my own passage — swift,
coracled, resplendent, over
the water — might stand compared
are clouds now,
now interruption,
the way that water is interruption,
the land only ending
apparently,
there, where not so long ago
I pushed off from it,
it does not end ...
It seems I am rowing,
it seems
to the rhythm of
a song there's nothing
left of
except the rhythm,
no notes,
a broken line, the words, to
— guessing — sing to, No, sing
No, 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, doing
the water's version of pucker, then
bloom,
then sprawl.
I look to the shore as if
toward 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 blame
me, if I am everything your heart
has led to.
Hazel trees;
ghost-moths in the hazel branches.
Why not stay?
It's a dream I've had
twice now: God is real, as
the difference between
having squandered faith and having lost it
is 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 arrangement
of holes and
hooks, buckles. What else did you think
mercy looked like,
he says and, demonstrating, he straps it on, then takes it off.
THE REST OF LOVE
The hive is for where
the 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 mythology
as, by now,
you must also. The bull
for slaughter; the number of days
required for the carcass to rot
correctly —
so that eventually, the bees come back,
lifting the dropped veil of
themselves up,
into the air, like some
dark and obvious
exception to a rule
I once knew. Is it true that
nothing lacks, given
the 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 have
seen before.
Is it latchless, or only
unlatched,
that door,
slamming?
By disarray,
I mean the look findable
in 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, that
just 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 to
rise and begin conquering? No,
farther.
Incongruities.
Tiger lilies —
little slaves, little
slaves in the light —
as an example. Words
to a childhood song
I'd thought forgotten, but
parts come back. I lie down.
I wear nothing at all.
LIKE STITCHES WHERE THE MOTHS HAVE MADE AN OPENING
Star-in-the-hand Cupped fire Fist,
luminous.
What keeps staying lost is not,
anymore, the thing itself, but the definition
it once provided,
as history does to what
occurs — to what has not, yet.
Leafe-gold, what is
blown — is blowable — away.
God enters me
as if from behind; he shakes, inside me. I want
what you want, he says. I say Why regard what I
can'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 imperfections
fade in a shabby harvest, the body — as again from
mistakes all the same enjoyed — lifts, staggers,
like light
off spokes of a wheel set spinning,
as the wheel
slows 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 star
already, going down.
At last the snow lies
unoracular,
unstepped across.
If I could speak, I'd speak
to no one, now. I'd remember the way everyone
else 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 held
in wind —
The map makes the getting there
at 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 training
to swag and scramble;
the waters there ...
A stillness like that of music resting — or sex,
after: what they call sadness, though it
is not sadness.
Country to which, increasingly, I've
felt native. I believe
I could —
Like asking at first Where am I
after 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 at
shoreline, recall or don't the startled angle
of retreat-before-temptation that is fixed,
apparently, instinctive in the saint — this is
how, in the old, illuminated paintings,
the saints most easily can be picked out
from the crowd around them, the crowd
whose purpose, I think, must be to remind us
that the world is larger, will always be larger
than its exceptions. The crowd equals
what's forgettable. 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
inside it, waiting — I'd heard all about
that one clear note it gives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rest of Love by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2004 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.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Sanctum,
Custom,
Tower Window,
Late, in a Time of Splendor,
Trophy,
Singing,
The Rest of Love,
Vow,
Like Stitches Where the Moths Have Made an Opening,
Late Apollo,
Mastery,
All It Takes,
The Way As Promised,
In Stone,
Conduct,
White Dog,
Fervor,
In Love,
The Rescue,
Sudden Scattering of Leaves, All Gold,
The Way As Promised,
North,
Hymns and Fragments,
Fresco: Cove and Spur,
The Rest of Love,
If a Wilderness,
Sunset, with Severed Head of Orpheus,
Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm,
The Grackle,
Pleasure,
Here, on Earth,
Anthem,
Like Cuttings for a Wreath of Praise and Ransom,
Sanctum,
Fray,
Crew,
Notes,
Also by Carl Phillips,
About the Author,
Copyright,