Winter 2023 | Carl Phillips reads three of his poems – MQR Sound
Carl Phillips reads three of his poems, "What Are We for What Are We," "Like So," "On Why I Cannot Promise", for MQR's Winter 2023 issue.
What Are We For What Are We
The buck’s iridescent titanium antlers
are meant to distract from the buck
himself, that he might instead seem
an oil spill, some likewise regrettable
aberration in the air, and not a deer
for trophy…
*
Proud it up all you want,
that you didn’t become the disaster you
once believed you were meant to be,
as if fate
were a real thing, and not just
many things randomly coinciding until
fate’s what we call it. Don’t look away;
you keep looking away, like it’s safe to.
Like So
From attention to adoration
is a smallish distance –
and yet no arrow, no boat
with sail
can cross it
like the mind’s insistence.
We’d reached the marshes, by then, that
all the dead must come to. I could see my face,
tilted there, like a solar eclipse viewed indirectly, which
is the proper way, in a basin of water. You must hold it steady,
keep the basin safe from the wind’s reach, its competing
powers of revelation and distortion.
On Why I Cannot Promise
Once, to ring the base of a tree’s trunk
meant protection; if the tree died,
or failed to flourish as hoped for,
then the ring had been somehow
not perfect, or the stones
weren’t the right ones; either way,
protection got confused
with invitation, and what was far,
what we’d hoped to keep far, came
close, settled in: not love, never
mind what it felt like, and not
regret, which I still can’t believe in –
I’ve tried – and not shame,
which I long ago lost
sight of, though I remember
waving to it, as it waved
back to me, its slow
wave back, for hadn’t the two of us, for
a good while, been pretty much
unstoppable, even if it hurt inside,
isn’t that where hurt
belongs, why should you
be different, a question I
still don’t get, to be honest. Say the part
about fear when you’re ready to, if you’re
ever ready to, you don’t have to,
they used to say, with that
flexibility that distinguishes
the second-tier gods
from the first tier. I couldn’t think,
and then I could think, but as when
there’s only starshine for a light
to go by, does that count
as thinking: we step away, we can
hear them still rattling – dead leaves –
though we hear from afar.
To read the rest of the issue, you can purchase the Winter 2023 issue here.
