The Cure

The Cure Carl Phillips (bio) The tree stood dying—dying slowly, in the usual manner of trees, slowly, but not without its clusters of spring leaves taking shape again, already. The limbs that held them tossed, shifted, the light fell as it does, through them, though it sometimes looked as if the light were being shaken, as if by the branches—the light, like leaves, had it been autumn, scattering down: singly, in fistfuls. Nothing about it to do with happiness, or glamour. Not sadness either. That much I could see, finally. I could see, and want to see. The tree was itself, its branches were branches, shaking, they shook in the wind like possibility, like impatient escorts bored with their own restlessness, like hooves in the wake of desire, in the wake of the dream of it, and like the branches they were. A sound in the branches like that of luck when it turns, or is luck itself a fixed thing, around which I myself turn or don't, I remember asking—meaning to ask. Where had I been, for what felt like forever? Where was I? The tree was itself, and dying; it resembled, with each scattering of light, all the more persuasively the kind of argument that can at last let go of them, all the lovely-enough particulars that, for a time, adorned it: force is force. The tree was itself. The light fell here and there, through it. Like history. No—history doesn't fall, we fall through history, the tree is history, I remember thinking, trying not to think it, as I lay exhausted down in its crippled shadow. Carl Phillips Carl Phillips, an associate editor of Callaloo, is author of seven volumes of poems, the most recent being The Tether (winner of the 2002 Kinsley Tufts Poetry Award), Rock Harbor, and The Rest of Love. He is also author of Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry. This professor of English and former director of the creative writing program at Washington University (St. Louis) has also received numerous other honors for his poetry—e. g., the Lamda Literary Award, the Morse Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Copyright © 2004 Charles H. Rowell

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