Monomoy by Carl Phillips

Monomoy

Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch

water from wells in buckets, then pour it out

for those animals that, long domesticated, would

likely perish before figuring out how to get

for themselves. That dog, for example, whose

refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child,

for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What

is it about vulnerability that can make the hand

draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem

the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force,

destructive? Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost

all of it, all the tenderness, away, someone screams

to someone else, in public — and looking elsewhere,

we walk quickly past, as if even to have heard

that much might have put us at risk of whatever fate

questions like that

                                     spring from. Estrangement — 

like sacrifice — begins as a word at first, soon it’s

the stuff of drama, cue the follow-up tears that

attend drama, then it’s pretty much the difference

between waking up to a storm and waking up

inside one. Who can say how she got there — 

in the ocean, I mean — but I once watched a horse

make her way back to land mid-hurricane: having

ridden, surfer-like, the very waves that at any moment

could have overwhelmed her in their crash to shore, she

shook herself, looked back once on the water’s restlessness — 

history’s always restless — and the horse stepped free.