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Overview
A stunning new collection of poems from the author of Speak Low
Comparing any human life to "a restless choir" of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: "now risk, and now / faintheartedness." In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there's only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back.
Double Shadow is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878846 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 138 KB |
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of ten previous books of poems, including Speak Low; Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986–2006; Riding Westward; and The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
Double Shadow
By Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2011 Carl PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7884-6
CHAPTER 1
FIRST NIGHT AT SEA
Like any other kingdom built of wickedness and
joy — cracked, anchorless, bit of ghost in the making,
only here for now. Blue for once not just as in
forgive, but blue as blue ... As affection was never
twilight, but a light of its own, blindness not at all
a gift to be held close to the chest, stubborn horse
meanwhile beating wild beneath it, stubborn heart,
a dark, where was a brightness, a bright where dark.
RANSOM
How he was carried in a ramshackle cart alongside the sea.
How he lay on his side, on a bed of straw —
mules pulling the cart; the straw
for the blood ... So it isn't true, even in reverse,
that I have no memory or that I felt no loss or a kind
of sorrow, or I have felt none since. The sea, as in
that underworld that mostly the mind resembles. Blood,
not as in power but the echo of it, and the echo fading —
fog as it lifts, delusion-like, come
clean again, from a thicket all thorns ... And how the stars
swelled the dark, guiding the man whose whip
made the mules go faster, though they would have
run, I think, even had there been no whip, being mules, and
broken long ago, and with no more belief than disbelief in rescue.
NEXT STOP, ARCADIA
There's a man asking to be worshipped only.
He looks inconsolable; rugged; like those
once-popular, but hardly seen anymore
portraits — depictions, really — of Jesus.
There's another man. He wants to be
flogged while naked and on all fours —
begging for it; no mercy; he says Make me
beg.
There's a field nearby. Stretch of field —
like the one they say divides prayer from
absolute defeat. Here's where the packhorse,
scaring at nothing visible, broke its tether;
no sign of it since. You know this field:
a constant stirring inside an otherwise great
stillness that never stops surrounding it,
the way memory doesn't, though memory
is not just a stillness,
but a field that stirs.
The two men — they've gone nowhere.
They've got questions. Like Which one's
the field you can actually remember? and
Which one's the one you're only imagining
now — standing inside it, staying there,
stay,
until it looks like home? Who are they,
to be asking questions? You look from one man
to the other. You keep looking — but between
submission, or the seeming resistance that
more often than not, lately, comes just
before it,
which is better? It's hard to decide:
the ugliness of weeping, or the tears themselves?
FASCINATION
Guttering in its stone urn from a century, by now,
too far away, the candle made of the room
a cavernousness. The shape of the light getting cast
upward, onto the room's ceiling, became a kind
of moon, some
overlooked, last round of desire —
unclaimed, searching ...
* * *
There are places, still, that
no moonlight ever quite conquers: a thickness of brush,
the crossed limbs of cathedral pines,
defend the dark,
inside which — beneath it — the trapped fox has stopped
mutilating its own body to at last get free. Has stopped trying.
Consigns the rust-colored full length of itself to the frosted ground.
SKY COMING FORWARD
How the birches sway, for example. How they
tilt, on occasion, their made-to-tilt-by-the-wind
crowns. How by then he had turned his head
away, as if a little in fear; or shy, maybe ... Also
the leaves having stopped their falling. Or there
were no leaves left — left to fall. Which to call
more true? Love
or mercy? Both of his hands
upraised, but the better of the two tipped more
groundward, the other a lone bird lifting, as if from
a wood gone steep with twilight. Sometimes, an
abrupt yet gentle breaking of the storm
inside me:
for a moment, just the rings that form then disappear
around where some latest desire — lost, or abandoned —
dropped once, and disturbed the water. To forget —
then remember ... What if, between this one and the one
we hoped for, there's a third life, taking its own
slow, dreamlike hold, even now — blooming, in spite of us?
CONTINUOUS UNTIL WE STOP
But when I came to what I'd been told
was the zone of tragedy — transition — it was
not that. Was a wildering field, across it the light
steadily lessening, and the tall grasses, waving,
deepened their colors: blue-green, or
a greenish blue ... hard to tell, exactly. Was like
when the body surrenders to risk, that moment
when an unwillingness to refuse can seem
no different from an inability to,
though they are not the same — inability,
unwillingness. To have said otherwise
doesn't make it true, or even make it count
as true. Yes, but what does the truth
matter now, I whispered, stepping further inside what,
by then, was night, almost. The tamer animals
would soon lie down again, and the wild go free.
THE GRASS NOT BEING FLESH, NOR FLESH THE GRASS
Like one of those moths, palpable
just to look at, but as if weightless as dust,
colorless
as dust, landing on the sleeper's
mouth in the dream of darkness — and then the dark,
for real — he came to me. Rest, I said; and for many years,
between love and a way of loving — for they are not
the same — it is true,
he did rest. Fluttering moth, all the more
attractive for the torn, the battered parts. As with
the others before, and since then. Him turning, or
sometimes
I did: birch leaves when, in a gust of storm,
they'll show the side that's silver, in the same way that
certain hard mistakes do, though less
unexpectedly. Aren't they
always fluttering? Rest, I say,
each night — to each of each of them. And in the dream, I'm resting.
THE HEAT OF THE SUN
Calming the bell was nothing easy. Nor did
the calmness, after, make the air surrounding it —
though at first it had seemed to — any more
still,
or clear. The usual clouds building up
into shapes I almost recognized, and then
letting go of them. Customs like the breaking
in two of willow branches, which maybe still
stands for parting, somewhere. Maybe the mistake
of hoping
never to make mistakes is the only
pattern we get to leave behind us: no bells — just
a calmness, after; the air so clear, we forget what
hurt so much and, in forgetting it, think it's disappeared.
THROUGH AN OPENING
It was as if they'd stepped into the head
of a wind god
and gotten trapped there and,
within captivity, made a space they could
sometimes recognize. Soon it looked
like home: chicken hawk; first stars;
a golden steeple ... Almost, they could believe
each word of it,
the wordless parts also,
the particular riot — and beauty, for they did
admit as much — of a field on fire, the wind
tumbling through the god's hair, here and
there lifting it — so a kind of life, still —
They would make
a music of it. Singing
Hush now — why not hush? You're mine, coyote.
AFTER THE THUNDER, BEFORE THE RAIN
Cicadas, or locusts — by whatever name, they've at last
gone silent, like suitors outmatched by what the body can
sometimes ask for and, other times, require. You've said
what you've said. So have I. What I think I meant, though,
was not guilt, but humility: being able to see — to recognize —
a failure that belongs, finally, not so much to the dream as
to the dreamer. As if that
matters, now ... Neither viciousness
nor the right kind of love, if there even is such a place. Not
abandon, but no harm, or less of it. Not at all like the mind
circling, ring upon ring — I can't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't
have, I'll never again — no end, no apparent ending. What I
meant was: as a suddenly wounded bird of prey, from a steep
and harder-by-the-moment-to-negotiate height descending.
THE SHORE
Don't be afraid — Don't go — Passenger me back to
a land called neither Honeycomb nor Danger — Yes,
that's what they kept whispering, as if in prayer (but
to what, or whom?), or at least sometimes whispering,
other times more loudly: You're a memory You're
the future You're a memory
as from a wilderness of
longing for something by now so clearly irretrievable
(we look back once, I think, if we're lucky — if
twice lucky, we never look back again), their bodies
meanwhile lifting, falling, sexual, like hammers, like
a hammer thrown up into and across where the sky
had begun — slowly, then more slowly — to seem
too wrecked enough already to sustain more damage.
THE NEED FOR DREAMING
As a scar commemorates what happened,
so is memory itself but a scar. As in: Given
hunger, which is endless only until it isn't, he
destroyed what he could. And then? —
So the lover enters the beloved — enters,
and withdraws; so a yellow-crested
night heron wades into view, then out:
useless? It gets harder to say. Like
signs of struggle in a field where nothing
stirs, the past can seem everywhere. I think
to be useless doesn't have to mean
not somehow mattering. Years now, and
still I can't stop collecting the strewn shells
of spent ammunition where I come across them;
carefully, I hold each up toward what's left of the light.
COMES THE FALL
But differently, the kind of bondage that's been
mostly sport — meaning competition — becoming force
of habit, and then just how it's been always: little
crack in the glass that regret blows sometimes
through, beyond it the branches and the foliage
that they hold indifferently aloft, each leaf a ribbed
sail that the wind catches, the way hunger
catches, the land falling away as the sea opens
out again into a loneliness that, often enough,
freedom also means — doesn't it?... As if
all this time you'd been dreaming. A dream
of horses. Two of them. Fitted with blinders. This,
the better life, the best way. Horses, and the present
future they kept thundering into ...
MASTER AND SLAVE
For the longest time, he said nothing. I looked
through the glass at what he was looking at: brindled
dog shaking the rain free of herself in a field of flowers,
making the colors stir where, before, there'd been
a stillness like what precedes a dangerous undertow or
a choice that, for better — and worse — will change a life
forever.
If you can't love everything, he said,
Try to love what, in the end, will matter. Not the dog,
doomed to fail, but the rain itself; the rain, getting
shaken ... There are days when, almost, I think I know
what he meant by that. I can understand — I can at least
believe I do — his face, his mouth, that last time: for once,
unferocious; done with raging at his own regretlessness and confusion.
CLEAR, CLOUDLESS
Tonight — in the foundering night, at least,
of imagination, where what I don't in fact
believe anymore, all the same, is true —
the stars look steadily down upon me. I look
up, at the stars. Life as a recklessly fed bonfire
growing unexpectedly more reckless seems
neither the best nor worst of several choices
within reach, still. I wear on my head a crown
of feathers — among which, sure, I have had
my favorites. Fear, though, is the bluest feather,
and it is easily the bluest feather that the wind loves most.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Double Shadow by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2011 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.
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Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
EPIGRAPH,
First Night at Sea,
Ransom,
Next Stop, Arcadia,
Fascination,
Sky Coming Forward,
Continuous Until We Stop,
The Grass Not Being Flesh, Nor Flesh the Grass,
The Heat of the Sun,
Through an Opening,
After the Thunder, Before the Rain,
The Shore,
The Need for Dreaming,
Comes the Fall,
Master and Slave,
Clear, Cloudless,
Roses,
Night,
On Horseback,
Almost Tenderly,
Tell Me a Story,
Dark Angel,
As If Lit from Beneath, and Tossing,
Glory On,
My Bluest Shirt,
Of the Rippling Surface,
The Gristmill,
After Winning the West,
Sacrifice Is a Different Animal Altogether,
Like a Lion,
Civilization,
Immaculate Each Leaf, and Every Flower,
The Life You Save,
Heaven and Earth,
Cathedral,
NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY CARL PHILLIPS,
COPYRIGHT,