Rockabye by Carl Phillips

Rockabye

                      Weeping, he seemed more naked

than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when

we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying

someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then

keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what

we called them made every difference. As when history

sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion

at once delivers

           and shrouds meaning . . . About love: a kind

of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed

a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more

clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken

stay broken, sings the darkness, I

                                     make the darkness

sing it . . . Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows

of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.