Sir Liege

Sir Liege Carl Phillips (bio) Like love, you must lie somewhere sleeping. There will be, then, no Eastering—that is, if I drift now, I drift expecting no especially corporeal levitation: as the song says, aubade. But as ever, a snow’s calligraphy bores me, and any Sunday means snow—real, imagined, a soft, blanketing blank across which a world skis, becomes Pharaoh, a child-king, sterile. Every bell hangs with all the stillness of waiting just to know, to know again, its six-days-absent clapper, beating song. Sir Liege, however prone to a sensation of being from some be-vertigoed height let go: gladly, gladly would I ascend to, would I burnish their sorrow for mine . . . . Knowing nothing will get past it, this seeming law of give, shelve over and finally down, in steady time; and having cast no blind eye to that staggered calendar, my life, I am of late all fears uncaptained, consigned to none but their own trembling, though well-pressed, company. Above them, a bluejay has just aired its one call —familiar, ominously slow-creaking hinge. It flies away, another locked and coasting revelation, leaves us that other winged thing, thorny symbol: the blue of which loss, when? Tell me, skimming the blue of what hereafter? 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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