Read an Excerpt
The Tether
By Carl Phillips Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2001 Carl Phillips
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8007-8
CHAPTER 1
AUGUST–DECEMBER
LUCK
What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until—innocent,
with art for once
not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next
in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid
between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through
air a path invisible, but there ...
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,
it is the unsubstantial—that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it—that most bewilders,
even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more
than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,
his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,
later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.
JUST SOUTH OF THE KINGDOM
It is for, you see, eventually the deer to
take it, the fruit
hangs there. Meanwhile, they
graze with the kind
of idleness that suggests
both can be true: to see—and seem
not to—the possible danger of
us watching;
to notice, and to also
be indifferent to the certain
plunder of, between them
and us, the lone
tree, thick with apples the deer have
only to nose
up against,
what's ripe will fall, will
become theirs.
—A breeze, slightly—
in which, if nobody, nothing moves,
nevertheless when it comes to
waiting it is useless,
understand, to think the deer
won't outlast us. They have,
as do all animals before the getting
tamed, a patience that
comes from the expectation of,
routinely, some hungering.
Ourselves, we are bored easily:
how much time can
be left before—as toward, say,
an impossible suitor whom already
we've kept long enough
baying—we'll turn away, and
begin the life I've heard tell of?
The light is less, there. One of us
has betrayed the other.
SPOILS, DIVIDING
Thank you for asking—
yes,
I have thought on the soul,
I have decided
it should not be faulted for
its indifference: that is as it
must be.
How blame
the lantern whose limits
always are only the light of
itself, casting the light
out?
That the body enjoys
some moment
in that light, I regard
as privilege.
Say what
you will.
The hawk's shadow
darkening
the zeroed-in-upon prey,
the victim
classically becoming
quite still—
It is very
like that. Having
understood which, I admit to
—also—the body as mere
story
whose ending,
like the story itself, is
small—how
not to think, for a time, that it
is not finished,
though it
is finished—
The ending was always this one.
Prediction,
gift,
science.
What shines now doesn't, won't
in our lifetime
stop shining—
no.
I turned away.
WORDS OF LOVE
Don't.
When I point
out to you that
the flat face of the lake's water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing's
beauty, can at last
define it. Don't
go, I mean,
possibly. If I have
described us
as a reasonable but flawed kind
of proof of
some fact that I keep
forgetting, I might have
added that not
only do I respect, I
require mystery.
Less and less
am I one of those who believes
To know a thing,
first you touch it
—as among the blind, or
as among such as are
more inclined than
ourselves, lately, to living on
life's reportedly still perilous, still
exhilarating
edge. Ourselves
exhausted,
even as a child's body, sometimes, will
fall toward sleep out of sheer
waiting,
uncertainty,
how will the story end?
There was, one time, a stag ...
And now there isn't,
is there?
And no, he won't come,
ever, back. This is the widening, but
not unbeautiful wake of his having
left us, and this
is the light—
true,
exotic,
faded slightly—in which
much, still, is possible:
Don't promise—
Don't forget—
THE POINT OF THE LAMBS
"The good lambs
in the yellow barn—the rest
housed in blue." By
"the rest," meaning those who
—the guide explained—inevitably
arrive suffering. "For
some do," he added.
Soft.
Serious. This—like
a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual
stammer of heart the naïve
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What
must it be, to pass
thus—clean, stripped—
through a life? What
reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches
is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but
too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I
mean is we moved
closer,
in,
to the blue barn's
advertisement—
flaw,
weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days
old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small
crowd of us
shifting forward, and—
in our shifting uniformly—it
being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind
single gesture—kowtow,
upheaval—there was
little difference. Some
took photographs; most
did a stranger thing: touched
briefly, without
distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less
for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe—given the lambs who
besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating
the dwindling contract
between the two,
the flies everywhere)—
maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand's instinct
to follow the eye, to
confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there—yes—but
I myself touched no one.
A FORCE, AND WOULD CONSUME US
Because the lawn is not ours, I can
mind less
its destruction—
the pale grubs that become daily
more legion; and, tearing
at them,
the shimmering consequence of crows,
stiff chorus, each cast in the special
black
of bad news—only, always, what
is it? Until that, too, not
mattering: winter soon,
and you—
and I—
We'll have left here,
changed presumably, to guess
from the steady
coming of us both to wanting, differently,
the body. Still, I want it
with you, steadfastness remains
one of my two gifts, the other
less gift, perhaps, than simply a matter
of I can't help it,
namely a knack for making anything
mean something.
You will have seen what
that leads to. Last night,
it was the train shedding town the way
every night it does, but
also, this time, like
answer: how easily can grow
routine even the chance any
train equals—Now
go Now return How could I
not wake you?
For reasons possibly not yours,
I want the sunset that
you want.
Of heroes,
what I most remember is
that gesture—in
defeat, victory, the same—that
each comes to:
regards, as if for the first time, his own hands.
Mutters, or is silent.
Translations are various: God,
If not for, If only—
Look what I've done.
ROMAN GLASS
Even in the latter, raveling days of the republic, the Romans
clung archaically, naïvely
to a belief in equal rule: each year, two consuls were still
elected to govern—each
equally helpless, inconsequential.
If for nothing else, it's for at least his effectiveness and
unwavering sense of priority
that Julius Caesar deserves our attention. As example:
recognizing the folly of equal rule,
he quite efficiently—because literally—saw to the removal of
his colleague and enemy
Pompey's head. Never mind that he is said not to have given
such an order, that in public
he displayed revulsion upon being presented the head by his
victorious army; Caesar is
sure to have admired in the soldiers, if not their loyalty—which
virtue too, like
beauty, he understood as inherently flawed and therefore
subject to erosion—then their
precision, their thoroughness, their refusal to compromise any
more than had the blade
in the executioner's hand. Of course,
Caesar eventually was also murdered—but he prefigures and
serves as immediate catalyst
for empire, a system which, though bloodier, was nevertheless
more durable, hypnotic,
and worthy of study, hence the abrupt rise in the number of
those wanting to chronicle
their own times. Granted, the poetry produced in this period
remains (with a few
assumable exceptions) negligible in quality; but the prose
flourishes, especially that which
gets written under the most brutal, and often violent laws of
censorship. It is as
if restraint (often enough, a naggingly realistic fear for one's
life) exerted upon prose—
and relentlessly—whatever pressure it is that, in effect, can
render a poetry from prose,
in the way, say, sharded glass becomes other and newly valued,
given a long enough
exposure to the ocean's necessarily indifferent handling. That
piece in your hands now
—I found it just south of Rome, not far from the waters that,
despite pollution, when
they receive the light reflected off the salmon-, sky-,
oxblood-colored villas that front
the boat-littered bay of Naples, suggest something, still, of a
grand history that is
finally holy, there being always a holiness attached to that
which is absolute—even
should the subject prove, the entire time, to have been loss.
THIS, THE PATTERN
Of course, of course,
the doomed crickets. The usual—as if
just let go on their own
recognizance—few birds acting
natural, looking guilty.
Gray black gray.
You were right, regarding
innocence. A small pair of
smaller moths rising
parallel, simultaneous, ascent
itself the seeming axis for
what rotation? sex? combat?
joy as ritual and not quite green, more
yellow? Certain
other exultations.
You were right
the entire time. The end
of desire exactly where you
thought, once, you'd found it.
Blue, like you thought, the light
around him, the light
inside of which he sings
I lost my keys, my first compass,
a watch in the grass, sight of,
I lost my way.
Singing, as if no one had ever
before lost anything. He should
know better, the way
you do. In time
the field shifting utterly
until everything
far, everything remembered
is remembered dimly. Even
now something, for example, about
a fig tree— And then,
it is useless, gone, the unrequired
evidence all over that you are never,
never wrong. So—
why weeping?
why mercy?
Already here comes
again the glittering accident of
you, stumbling free of—across—
the others.
A few scratches, mostly. And
gratitude, yes,
but gratitude this time as only the first
part. Soon enough: What has happened,
it could happen again.
STAGGER
As when the flesh is shown
to be remarkable
most, for once, because
markless:
where the bruise
was, that we called
a bell, maybe, or
—tipped,
stemless—
a wineglass, or just
the wine spilling
out,
or a lesser lake viewed
from a great height
of air,
instead the surprise that
is blunder when it
has lifted, leaving
the skin to resemble
something like clear
tundra neither foot nor
wing finds,
—or shadow of.
When did the yard get
this swollen—
mint, apples,
like proof of all that
anyway went
on, in our distraction?
When did the room
itself start
stirring with—distant, but
decidedly—the scent of
pines wintering, further
still, a not-very-far
sea—
MEDALLION
He must be calling from somewhere
very near
the water, I can hear it
behind what
he is telling me of
last night's
dream, which was sexual,
which was
unusual for its details.
It must be bright there
still. Afternoon-ish,
letting go.
Here, the wooded yard
blackens, becomes again
a new country, unstrung as
yet of streetlight.
No streets yet.
Because entering its dark feels
more like only
entering now,
further,
my life, it is less unsettling than
the first time.
I can, almost,
want the hearing and
not knowing which
one—human, animal—
moves, toward me,
the not having
to assign noise a name
more specific than Some
mouths hungry,
Something tears at the late leaves.
There must be, everywhere,
the water,
getting perhaps
unavoidably reduced to
blue
tumbling context, him
adapting quickly
to native custom, he
must resemble them
already, taking for granted
that which can hardly be
blamed for its own
abundance—it must
start, that way:
none of us meaning, anyone, any harm.
REGALIA FIGURE
We were mistaken, I think.
I think the soul wants
no mate
except body, what it has
already, I think
the body is not
a cage,
no,
but the necessary foil
against which the soul
proves it was always
true, what they said: to stand
unsuffering
in the presence of another's
agony is its own
perhaps difficult but
irrefutable pleasure.
That I might not have
thought so, without
you, I understand now.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tether by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2001 Carl Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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