Honey Hush

Honey Hush Carl Phillips (bio) I. It will be as if: fur. As if trust could be fur. Imagine, bees coat the sugar body that is yours . . . see how your body hums? Say you love them. Now. You must say you love them. And I would, and —I would, until it was true almost, and then true: I could love the bees, and neither mind nor be surprised by their weight, slow as drones and as deliberate, upon me. II. Every fall, still, the deer swim the cold channel between the island whose name I don’t know and this island. Their instinct is: they need more; and that, here, they will find it. From the shore, children make of their small hands small binoculars, and guess at which ones will drown. For some of the deer always drown. They lose, I think, whatever for a deer [End Page 195] hope can be. And it weighs something, that loss. How else understand it, this swimmer, that one, there and then not, except as when sometimes the body meets a weight sudden, unlooked-for, and large, the way persuasion is large— or despair: no struggle attends that descent. 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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