For Long to Hold

Carl Phillips

              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 mistaken 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.

Carl Phillips is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007–2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. A new book of poems, Scattered Snows, to the North, will be out in the early fall of 2024. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Originally published:
April 1, 2014

Featured

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware

Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis
Meghan O’Rourke

You Might Also Like



Subscribe

New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
Subscribe