"After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?"
"After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?"
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Overview
"After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?"
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466875845 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 135 KB |
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of eleven previous books of poetry, including Speak Low (FSG, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Double Shadow (FSG, 2011), also a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent book of prose is The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
Silverchest
By Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2013 Carl PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7584-5
CHAPTER 1
JUST THE WIND FOR A SOUND, SOFTLY
There's a weed whose name I've meant all summer
to find out: in the heat of the day, dangling pods hardly
worth the noticing; in the night, blue flowers ... It's as if
a side of me that he'd forgotten had forced into the light,
briefly, a side of him that I'd never seen before, and now
I've seen it. It is hard to see anyone who has become
like your own body to you. And now I can't forget.
AND OTHER ANIMALS
Roughly the river, running swift, and silver.
The usual more sluggish business of erosion
to either side of it — this life,
for that one. Green
ambivalence of the trees where the forest shelves:
so the dark deepens. So the dead become earth
and then nothing, things that will never matter
now in the way they used to, for —
yes, they
used to, or so we tell ourselves, pretending grief
is like that. Wishes, rising suddenly up elsewhere,
take their places in a shifting line called Better wish
again. Maybe joy really
is a kind of spindrift —
spinning, drifting — on a sea of sorrow, though it
looked like prayer, and it felt like power, them
kneeling before me as if to receive at last their crowns.
SO THE MIND LIKE A GATE SWINGS OPEN
When it comes to what, eventually, it must come to,
don't forget to say to yourself Has it come to this again
already? Look a little lost, maybe,
but unsurprised.
Sometimes it feels like being a carousel horse, but
with all the paint gone strange-like, all the wood gone
driftwood, all the horses I've corralled inside me set free,
confused now, because now what? The snow fell like
hope when it's been forsaken, just before the wind shifts —
then the wind shifts, the snow flies upward ... I love you
means what, exactly? In the end, desire may turn out
to be no different from any other song —
sing, and be at
last released from it. Not so long ago as I'd like to think,
I used to get drunk in parking lots with strangers: we'd park,
we'd drink, and — and didn't think what to call it, the rest
that came after, what is a thing like that worth calling: he
took me into his arms? he held me? I know longing's
a lot like despair: both can equal everything you've ever
hoped for, if that's how you want it — sure, I get that. What's
wrong with me, I used to ask, but usually too late, and not
meaning it anyway. He touches me, or I touch him, or don't.
THE JETTY
Some are willing to trust any anchor. Some will
choose the ship anyway, no matter how anchorless
and dashed, between the wind and the sea. The sea
the same then as now: more blear than blue, more
blue than silver — processional, seeming to blur
at once increasingly and at random toward and
away from where everything catches fire except
what doesn't. How they fucked him, yes, until
he couldn't, yes, but — couldn't what. The raptor's
wing unfolds, and then folds back. We turn here, but
separately. Did his eyes close. Did he close them.
Look how the jetty shines in the sun, for nothing.
NOW ROUGH, NOW GENTLE
Never mind the parts that came later, with all
the uselessness, as usual, of hindsight: regret's
what it has to be, in the end, in which way it is
like death, any bowl of sliced-fresh-from-the-tree
stolen pears, this body that stirs,
or fails to, as I
turn away, meaning Make it yours, or Hold tight,
or I begin to think maybe you were right — that
there's nothing, after ... though whether or not like
one of those moments just past having woken to
yet another stranger,
how the world can seem
to have completely stopped when, finally, it's just
a stillness — who can say? First I envied them,
then I came to love them for it, how the stars each
day become again invisible, while going nowhere.
FLIGHT OF DOVES
I have been the king for whom the loveliest beasts
were slaughtered and turned trophy. I've seen how
brutality becomes merely the rhythm to a kind of
song to sing while bearing the light steadily forward,
the light in panels, in the shape that luck mostly takes
before a life comes true again: the room no different
than I remember leaving it: the snow still falls into it,
on the same man bound naked to a chair, and trembling,
saying Take me — meaning what, though, or where? — as
I brush the snow from his hair, as I take him, in my arms.
SURROUNDED AS WE ARE, UNLIT, UNSHADOWED
Squalor of leaves. November. A lone
hornets' nest. Paper wasps. Place where
everything that happens is as who says it will,
because. As in Why shouldn't we have
come to this, why not, this far, this
close to
that below-zero where we almost
forget ourselves, rise at last unastonished
at the wreckery of it, what the wreckage
somedays can seem all along to have
been mostly, making you wonder what fear
is for, what prayer is, if not the first word
and not the last one either, if it changes
nothing of what you are still, black stars,
black
scars, crossing a field that you've
crossed before, holding on, tight, though
careful, for you must be careful, so easily
torn is the veil diminishment comes
down to as it lifts and falls, see it falling,
now it lifts again, why do we love, at all?
BLUEGRASS
And he told me nowhere was a lake that,
any day now, he'd surely drown in. What's the right
answer to a thing like that?
* * *
So we just stood there,
the two of us — shaking a bit in the cold,
but pretty still, mostly. Horses in a field of moonlight.
AFTER THE AFTERLIFE
Bones, for sure. Feathers almost the white
of an eagle's undershaftings in its first year.
Any wind, that stirs. Punishment in death
as it is in trembling: how it lifts, descends,
though — like having meant to be kind, yet
failing anyway — it can do no good. After
the afterlife, there's an afterlife. A stand of
cottonwood trees getting ready all over again,
because it's spring, to release their seeds that
only look like cotton; they're not cotton, at all.
What we lose, without thinking to; what we
give, for free. Distinctions that, if they even
did before, now don't matter. Any shadows
that break break randomly across these waters.
FIRST YOU MUST COVER YOUR FACE
There's a handful of black bees fastened
to the crepe myrtle's shot, all-but-gone-to-seed
flowers. Is it days, really, or only moments ago
that I almost told you everything,
before remembering what that leads
or has led to? How still they are — the bees, I mean,
not the flowers bending and unbending beneath
a rain that's come suddenly and, just as suddenly,
has stopped falling ... Stillness, not of death,
but intoxication,
sweet coma,
zero-ness of no more wanting,
nothing left to want for, the meadow at last
fills with light, like a bowl,
filled with light, spilling with it, only harder now,
as if more desperate maybe, or just a thing that's brave.
BLACK SWAN ON WATER, IN A LITTLE RAIN
Seen this way,
through that lens where need
and wanting swim at random
toward each other, away again, and
now and then together, he moves less like
a swan — black, or otherwise — than like any
man for whom sex is, or has at last become,
an added sense by which to pass ungently but more
entirely across a life where, in between the silences,
he leaves what little he's got to show for himself
behind him in braids of water, green-to-blue wake of
Please and Don't hurt me and You can see I'm hurt, already.
MY MEADOW, MY TWILIGHT
Sure, there's a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
available, more to lose therefore, more to love, or
try to ...
But to look up from the leaves, remember,
is a choice also, as if up from the shame of it all,
the promiscuity, the seeing-how-nothing-now-will
save-you, up to the wind-stripped branches shadow
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn't it, toward
belief — whatever, in the end, belief
is ... You can
look up, or you can close the eyes entirely, making
some of the world, for a moment, go away, but only
some of it, not the part about hurting others as the one
good answer to being hurt, and not the part that can
at first seem, understandably, a life in ruins, even if —
refusing ruin, because you
can refuse — you look
again, down the steep corridor of what's just another
late winter afternoon, dark as night already, dark
the leaves and, darker still, the door that, each night,
you keep meaning to find again, having lost it, you had
only to touch it, just once, and it bloomed wide open ...
DISTRACTION
He did what I told him to,
which for once I thought shouldn't count
as weakness: he laid his gun on the bureau,
took his own shirt off first, then mine — but then wrapped
the gun up softly inside the both of them, sign
for many things, Trust me, Close your eyes, Make a wish,
so that I couldn't decide ...
You know how, when the light
flashes off water, then passes through it, then rubs up against,
it can seem just like the mind in a fix thinking its way
out of a fix, or at least trying to, the way Virgil in his
big poem describes it, and for a moment you think
everything's new that's been known forever — swamp-thistle,
bull-thistle, touch-me-not, red clover?
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN POWER AND FORCE
In the east country where I must have lived once,
or how else remember it, the words came falling to
every side of me, words from a life that I'd thought,
if not easy, might at least be possible, though that
was then: little crown and little burst of arrows
and ritual, loyalty, they are not the same ... I lay
rippling like a field shot through with amethyst
and reason. Then it seemed I myself was the field,
the words fell toward, then into me, each one no
sooner getting understood, than it touched the ground.
DARKNESS IS AS DARKNESS DOES
All night long, he's been a music almost
too far away to hear, and the man who
thinks he hears something that could maybe
be music: bits of flourish where there can't
or shouldn't be. As when camouflage matters
suddenly less than stillness. Nothing in this world
like being held, he says, turning away, meaning
I should hold him ... I have been to Rome,
I have known the body, I have watched it fall,
and the green, green grass. How the deer re
unsettled themselves across it, disproportionately
clumsy, for when they ran, there was grace. Then
the dream dog emerging again — hindquarters
first, as if dragging a great heaviness finally free
from the stand of trees that swayed, for a while,
the way bamboo does. Then silver birches.
NEON
A boy walks out into a grayish distance, and he never comes back.
Anger confusable with sorrow, sorrow canceling all the anger out ...
It's the past, and it isn't. It's forever. And it isn't. The way, in hell,
flickering's what they say what's left of the light does — a comfort,
maybe, and maybe not. Sometimes by innocence I think I've meant
the innocence of carnivores, raised in the wild, for whom the killing
is sportless, clean, unmetaphysical — then I'm not so sure. Steeplebush
flourished by some other name, lost now, long before there were
steeples. I think we ruin or we save ourselves. Comes a day when
the god, what at least you've called a god, takes you not from behind,
the usual, but pins you instead, his ass on your chest, his cock in your
face, his mouth twisting open, saying Lick my balls, and because you
want to live, in spite of everything, you do what he says, heaven and
earth, some rain, a few stars appearing, harder, the way he tells you to,
then not so hard, a tenderness like no tenderness you've ever shown.
GHOST HOUR
Scattered soot, by which the myth you made for yourself,
before at last becoming the myth, has sometimes been
more easily understandable — but sometimes not — there's
no one now; look away.
A stillness falls across the blue
ghetto of a life where it's been easy enough to lie down
freely with strangers, tower over them, leave them behind
for the other life, meaning this one, where a stillness falls
also, but this time the way shadows fall, weightless, and yet
they change everything, they change everything beneath them.
BLIZZARD
After agony had left his body to find another,
or in search of no one, just agony on its
own for once, merely cruising,
something stayed, like
a precipitate — grief maybe,
that's what they said,
as if such had ever been
grief's properties ... Why is lying
to others always so much harder
than to ourselves? Yesterday, for example,
starlings in flight, the ice of
the frozen pond beneath them briefly
containing their shadows — not
reflecting them,
not the way water does, the way
the water did, the way it will
in spring when the pond has unlocked itself
all over again with
no more regard than disregard
for the wings and faces that pass, or don't,
across it, so what,
so what? When I say
I trust you, I mean I've considered
that you could betray me, which means I know
you will, that we'll have between us at last
that understanding which is a safer thing
than trust, not a worse,
not a better thing ... Wanderer,
whisperer,
little firework, little
not-my-own, soon enough
the non-world we've been steering for
from the start: colorless, stripped of motion, all those
pleasures you knew so well how to give to others
gone also — pleasure,
I can hear you say, what world
was that
INTERIOR: ALL THE LEAVES SHAKE OFF THEIR LIGHT
It was then we found ourselves too many fields away from
where we'd meant to be, with regard to desire, to get there
ever, even if — though this was not the case — we'd been
told the way. Sure, we'd developed a patience, perhaps
even a taste for being lost, but we were plain exhausted: not
in our bodies, which had forgotten nothing of what they'd
known of heat, or of what to do with it — wasn't it this that
had rescued us, mostly, from many worse persuasions, as we
passed the time? — but if not in our bodies, then where, where
else exhausted? Come weather, come whatever-we've-sworn,
we leave our tracks in the dirt where of course we have to,
say the ghosts in the walls, slurring their usual handful of notes
remembered of the song that, together, each touch, each bruise
equals. Then they fade like smoke, or a bit like regret. Who
cares, anymore, about ghosts? Our ambitions were very high;
on occasion, we fell from them — swiftly, without surprise,
and very far. Never, though, never would we have called that
failure, no — not then, and not now either. For here we are.
IN THIS WORLD TO BE LOST
Get dressed —
We should leave, now.
As for the so-called waters of persuasion,
why not cast what's left of belief
upon them?
As when we come to love a thing
for no better reason than that we have found it,
and find it wants for love. Have you ever
done that?
Some asleep-looking bird, say, that's
dead really, lying
dead in the straw-grass, the grass and
the imaginary conversation it makes
with itself ...
Or any man in tears, whispering If
I go down on whoever tells me to, is it prayer,
isn't it, did I pray
enough?
Waves,
then waves in reverse —
maybe that's all we're given.
Maybe stamina's just a fairer form of stubborn,
and maybe not. As for autumn,
that predictable drama will soon enough,
presumably,
be again beginning. — Get dressed. And,
upon the confusion/unconfusion
that the waves make, let's cast what's left.
BOW, AND ARROW
Not the war, but the part just after,
when a great stillness whose beauty we'd have
missed, possibly, had we instead
been spared, hovers over the ruins.
* * *
Put your head in among the flowers —
do it: but for
me this time, not yourself, is what I think he said.
AS FOR THAT PIECE OF SUNDOWN YOU'VE BEEN
WANTING
Like little forges for which the heart too often
gets mistaken, the dogs run ahead of me, just
out of earshot, across what's a field, and then
a coast: some stones, some sand. Funny how
sorrow more often arrives before honesty, than
the other way round. To my left, a blackness
like the past, but without the past's precision;
to my right, the ocean ... Not so lost as I'd
been thinking, then — or had once, admittedly,
maybe even hoped for. Kingdom of what's left,
still, to be angry at, or forgive. All of the bees
flying at last out of me. We're traveling north.
UNDO IT
Deep from within the changing colors of a life
that itself keeps changing, I know the leaves prove
nothing — though it
does seem otherwise — about
how helplessness is not a luxury, not a hurt by
now worth all the struggling to take back, but
instead what we each, inevitably, stumble
sometimes into,
and sometimes through ... As for
that grove-within-a-grove that desire has, so long,
looked like — falling, proof of nothing, carrion birds
clouding the slumped boughs of the mountain ash —
I can almost see again: we'll drown anyway — why not
in color? You're no more to me a mystery, than I to you.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Silverchest by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2013 Carl Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
EPIGRAPH,
Just the Wind for a Sound, Softly,
And Other Animals,
So the Mind Like a Gate Swings Open,
The Jetty,
Now Rough, Now Gentle,
Flight of Doves,
Surrounded As We Are, Unlit, Unshadowed,
Bluegrass,
After the Afterlife,
First You Must Cover Your Face,
Black Swan on Water, in a Little Rain,
My Meadow, My Twilight,
Distraction,
The Difference Between Power and Force,
Darkness Is As Darkness Does,
Neon,
Ghost Hour,
Blizzard,
Interior: All the Leaves Shake Off Their Light,
In This World to Be Lost,
Bow, and Arrow,
As for That Piece of Sundown You've Been Wanting,
Undo It,
Late in the Long Apprenticeship,
Snow Globe,
Border Song,
Bronze Where Once the Blue Had Been,
Brace of Antlers,
Shimmer,
Your Body Down in Gold,
Anyone Who Had a Heart,
Now You Must Go Wherever You Wish,
Dominion,
But Waves, They Scatter,
Silverchest,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY CARL PHILLIPS,
COPYRIGHT,