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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Abbreviation,
part that gives what is left
away. As if released,
a stone—as from
a sling. The landscape opening as if no end to it,
a longing anywhere
for some resistance, some
stop: the magnolia, its ring of bird-ravaged
seed-cones,
the birds themselves, a wind lifting
a collar of feathers at the neck of each—stiff
courtiers,
Elizabethan. Clarity, versus
blur.
Fine distinctions.
Not, it seems,
the cries of joy. Not punishment—think
in terms of, instead,
persuasion. Silo, through which
the rains, passing,
pass unimpeded. Hunger
versus the pursuit of it. That’s what they say.
With time, with wear,
the leather softening. They say
the legs go here. The straps adjust.
Like so.
Carl Phillips’s most recent book of poems is Wild Is the Wind, forthcoming from FSG in early 2018. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
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