Dearest Won

Dearest Won Carl Phillips (bio) Soon, I suspect, I shall be done with the dove, and the steep rescue its wings once, in storied flight unfolding, meant promise of. Confess—if I grow used, now, to a life all jazz-less blow and drag of storm, it was not always so: before I’d crossed a lover’s trust, only to learn I did not mind it; before I’d broken— not a heart, but that as-yet deviceless, still-apt-at-knee-to-buckle child that, having looked every elsewhere, we turn at last to the heart’s winded field and find, by a first snow amused, amazed, finally—bewildered. In the scant, hypnotic stagger to which here, in the glowing walls of illumination, all walking is shorn down, I need make room for no one, with the exception of my lately familiar but, for all that, no less esteemed consort: praise. Though restive as leaves, ever busy sustaining then spilling the next brilliance, I shall look to none to be lifted, evenings when it is all I have wanted: to lie hollowed out, crowned, gifted, and as pale . . . . as pale as—if damage could have flesh— that flesh would be. In truth, regret, I am like damage, be sure. I do not fail. 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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