The Sleigh Ride

The Sleigh Ride Carl Phillips (bio) What I remember is—actual reindeer, harnessed; that velvet and story could be harnessed; and could smell as leather, like restraint, does when grown used to, gone soft with matching its own labor against that of the flesh whose natural sway is toward recovery of a life somewhere, instinctively, remembered as untamed . . . —And that it was lonely, despite the wind stinging everywhere but (as if to suggest I am never far, you I don’t yet abandon) here especially, at the right nipple, lasting token of what returns now, but dimly: his teeth coming down, grazing, his mouth mumbling about gifts—as I have learned gods can do: at once speak with the mouth full, give, give—and lose nothing. How difficult was it, even for the child I was then, to understand? I could tell it was neither rescue nor that other country, feverless good health to which (animal-powered, yes, but as effortless, it seemed—as silent— as the passing of habit down, over time, into tradition) the sleigh bore me, [End Page 187] no. It was the endless, lustered blank of between when a thing ends truly and before the next thing begins, a landscape no longer flannel long slept-on, but of snow that—turning at last to look back, seeing it helpless to do anything but take into itself the shackle, the shaft, the ravenous length of throat the sleigh’s runners drew across it—I knew already to forgive. As we are always right to forgive the messenger, the blameless seer who receives, announces only, can neither alter nor stop what comes abundant with conclusion; what next will tear us—revenant, and forward. Carl Phillips Carl Phillips is the author of In the Blood, which won the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and Cortége, a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is an associate professor of English and African and African-American Studies at Washington University (St. Louis), where he directs the Creative Writing Program. Copyright © 1998 Charles H. Rowell

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