Granted
This is for f8n_begorra, who is amazing enough to ask for a poem of a mornin'.
This is Carl Phillips. A gay man, a classicist and a teacher by training. This poem is taken, I think, hehehe, appropriately enough, from a collection called The Tether. This man's lucidity, his subtlety, amaze me.
Chamber Music
Like something broken of wing,
lying there.
Other than breathing's rise, catch
release,
a silence, as of some especially wounded
animal that, nevertheless, still
is conscious,
you can see
straight through the open
eye to where instinct falters because
for once it has come
divided: to cry out
could bring rescue; would
mean announcing, as well,
weakness, the very
helplessness for which
hasn't all this time every gaped mouth been
but waiting?
I dislike weakness, I
sang to him,
him taking my good arm
like a kind of oar,
and him drowning,
and the water as wide as Bible
says,
and no dove -- as if not
anywhere now a brightness to
that room:
only the brawl of the wind
making its here-and-there bits of
difference -- to the curtain,
to a shirt
swelling like, inside it, a living body or
a boy's hair, for a time, lifting.
World of nothing-to-
constrain-me. Turn it over. Now do it again.
---
Good gab. Thanks, fella.
This is Carl Phillips. A gay man, a classicist and a teacher by training. This poem is taken, I think, hehehe, appropriately enough, from a collection called The Tether. This man's lucidity, his subtlety, amaze me.
Chamber Music
Like something broken of wing,
lying there.
Other than breathing's rise, catch
release,
a silence, as of some especially wounded
animal that, nevertheless, still
is conscious,
you can see
straight through the open
eye to where instinct falters because
for once it has come
divided: to cry out
could bring rescue; would
mean announcing, as well,
weakness, the very
helplessness for which
hasn't all this time every gaped mouth been
but waiting?
I dislike weakness, I
sang to him,
him taking my good arm
like a kind of oar,
and him drowning,
and the water as wide as Bible
says,
and no dove -- as if not
anywhere now a brightness to
that room:
only the brawl of the wind
making its here-and-there bits of
difference -- to the curtain,
to a shirt
swelling like, inside it, a living body or
a boy's hair, for a time, lifting.
World of nothing-to-
constrain-me. Turn it over. Now do it again.
---
Good gab. Thanks, fella.