Late Empire

Late Empire Carl Phillips (bio) To those who were born wanting, the mornings came cockless, sunless, minus even the question of how, how to fill them, the pulled, gape-mouthed hours: no spire, no swollen clang of bells would serve. Who blames them if they wandered lonely, then, spare as exile kings in search of whatever hands that might crown them? Some few—the favored—found, briefly strutted, then consigned their fevered limbs to loss in the field whose name is variously Take me, For you and in stunning abundance I turn over, You are lord, by the grace that is yours, let me kneel. But most, in the end, came to the beautifully rugged but finally indifferent coast, boa-ed in the only too clear waters of suck, swallow, retreat; suck, swallow. . . . What was there, at that moment, except to turn back, return to something like home, to the bedroom’s blank and unbroidered sheets, the faux-fur throws cast resignedly floorward, the invisibly sconced and tapestried walls that had all day been waiting to receive (part groan, part sung frustration) those stiff commandments that the walls then—being walls, of course—patiently, with the patience only echo can sustain, gave back. 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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