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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.
Dry waterfall
that eventually, almost,
the skull resembled—
And then the skull was just
a skull.
The heart—
at last nothing
but a muscle moving,
not at all the talisman you’d imagined:
how if only you could touch it—how
everything, everything might
yet be different
if you did . . .
Is this
perfection,
or the cost of it?
If the mind seems
increasingly a landscape
where brush and desert, dry
prairie, and chaparral
coincide,
is this that landscape,
or the abandoned
set, finally, for one of those movies
that take place there: sudden
sandstorm, each man
immediately dismounting, each blinding,
with whatever cloth available,
his horse’s eyes . . .
That much, still,
is true, isn’t it?—the horse
comes first? then you do?
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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