Blow It Back by Carl Phillips

Blow It Back

 

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns.

How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow

the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had

briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there,

unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street

seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called

doubt, or that other one,

                                       persuasion, the broken one, in three

clean pieces    ...    Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo

bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but

nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by

now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening,

seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms

of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other

out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage

than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that

the world keeps saying it does, know it, hold on tight to it, as if

the world were rumor, how every rumor

                                                               rings true, lately.

When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what

is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety

of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please

and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be

an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make

with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it:

this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being

able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body

neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    . . .