It Worked for Carl Phillips
And so I'm going to spend the weekend on the Cape, near Rock Harbor taking in the chill, salt air.
Rock Harbor
The wind was high—it gave to your
hair a lift in equal parts gradual,
steep, disarming—
I love a storm,
and said so; by I have always
loved better the wreckage after,
I did not mean instead of, but
a preference.
To the air, an edge
anyone would call arctic—isn't
that why we left it nameless? To
your face, a look I'd admired before
in the bodies of those who seem
not so much indifferent as made
ignorant, or stunned as if by
sudden luck, or else repentant and
in payment, somehow, for what
all price falls like an irrelevance,
a stole, an expensive sail in a
calm away from. Sex
as a space available where neither
loss nor regret figures—imagine
that.
Or not having, finally, to take
anything away—in the form of
photographs of the mostly ice
that the harbor's water, the shore
past that, the street after had
become; or as words like those
that came to me: green, kind of,
lit almost, but as if from within
in places, a spill but
an arrested one, less force than
the idea of it, block and edge like
the chance for pattern, but
spent now or only, from the very
start, false
—false and singing.
The wind was high; it exaggerated
what you were already, a man
returning toward shelter he can't
see yet, but believes just ahead
exists, the sort of man for whom
to doubt at all is treason. By
not unfaithful, I understood I
could mean both things: I'd do
nothing I'd promised not to—
Also, there is nothing I'll forget.
— Carl Phillips
