excerpt

book.jpgTHE TETHER

By CARL PHILLIPS

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2001 Carl Phillips. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-26793-6



Contents

 

August-December
    Luck.............................................................3
    Just South of the Kingdom........................................5
    Spoils, Dividing.................................................7
    Words of Love...................................................10
    The Point of the Lambs..........................................13
    A Force, and Would Consume Us...................................17
    Roman Glass.....................................................20
    This, the Pattern...............................................23
    Stagger.........................................................25
    Medallion.......................................................27
    Regalia Figure..................................................30
    Strung Absentia.................................................33
    Recumbent.......................................................37
    Lustrum.........................................................40
January-May
    For the Falconer................................................45
    Tether..........................................................48
    Preamble........................................................51
    Chamber Music...................................................53
    Little Dance Outside the Ruins of Unreason......................55
    The Lost Chorus.................................................58
    The Pinnacle....................................................61
    Familiar........................................................66
    Chosen Figure...................................................69
    Caravan.........................................................71
    Safari Figure...................................................73
    Yours, and the Room After.......................................75
    The Figure, the Boundary, the Light.............................77
    Revision........................................................79
Acknowledgments.....................................................83


Chapter One


    LUCK


 

What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until—innocent,
with art for once

 

not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next

 

in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid

 

between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through

 

air a path invisible, but there ...
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,

 

it is the unsubstantial—that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it—that most bewilders,

 

even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more

 

than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,

 

his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,

 

later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.


    JUST SOUTH OF THE KINGDOM


 

It is for, you see, eventually the deer to
take it, the fruit

 

hangs there. Meanwhile, they
graze with the kind

 

of idleness that suggests
both can be true: to see—and seem

 

not to—the possible danger of
us watching;

 

to notice, and to also
be indifferent to the certain

 

plunder of, between them
and us, the lone

 

tree, thick with apples the deer have
only to nose

 

up against,
what's ripe will fall, will

 

become theirs.
—A breeze, slightly—

 

in which, if nobody, nothing moves,
nevertheless when it comes to

 

waiting it is useless,
understand, to think the deer

 

won't outlast us. They have,
as do all animals before the getting

 

tamed, a patience that
comes from the expectation of,

 

routinely, some hungering.
Ourselves, we are bored easily:

 

how much time can
be left before—as toward, say,

 

an impossible suitor whom already
we've kept long enough

 

baying—we'll turn away, and
begin the life I've heard tell of?

 

The light is less, there. One of us
has betrayed the other.


    SPOILS, DIVIDING


 

Thank you for asking—
yes, I have thought on the soul,

 

I have decided
it should not be faulted for
its indifference: that is as it

 

must be.
How blame
the lantern whose limits

 

always are only the light of
itself, casting the light
out?

 

That the body enjoys
some moment
in that light, I regard

 

as privilege.
               Say what
you will.

 

The hawk's shadow
darkening
the zeroed-in-upon prey,

 

the victim
classically becoming
quite still—

 

             It is very
like that. Having
understood which, I admit to

 

—also—the body as mere
story
whose ending,

 

like the story itself, is
small—how
not to think, for a time, that it

 

is not finished,
                  though it
is finished—

 

The ending was always this one.
Prediction,
gift,

 

science.
What shines now doesn't, won't
in our lifetime

 

stop shining—
               no.
I turned away.


    WORDS OF LOVE


 

Don't.
When I point
out to you that

 

the flat face of the lake's water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind

 

just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least

 

disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing's
beauty, can at last

 

define it. Don't
go
, I mean,
possibly. If I have

 

described us
as a reasonable but flawed kind
of proof of

 

some fact that I keep
forgetting, I might have
added that not

 

only do I respect, I
require mystery.
Less and less

 

am I one of those who believes
To know a thing,
first you touch it

 

—as among the blind, or
as among such as are
more inclined than

 

ourselves, lately, to living on
life's reportedly still perilous, still
exhilarating

 

edge. Ourselves
exhausted,
even as a child's body, sometimes, will

 

fall toward sleep out of sheer
waiting,
uncertainty,

 

how will the story end?
There was, one time, a stag ...
And now there isn't,

 

is there?
And no, he won't come,
ever, back. This is the widening, but

 

not unbeautiful wake of his having
left us, and this
is the light—

 

true,
exotic,
faded slightly—in which

 

much, still, is possible:
Don't promise—
Don't forget—


    THE POINT OF THE LAMBS


 

"The good lambs
in the yellow barn—the rest
housed in blue." By

 

"the rest," meaning those who
—the guide explained—inevitably
arrive suffering. "For

 

some do," he added.
Soft.
Serious. This—like

 

a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual

 

stammer of heart the naïve
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What

 

must it be, to pass
thus—clean, stripped—
through a life? What

 

reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches

 

is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but

 

too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I

 

mean is we moved
closer,
in,

 

to the blue barn's
advertisement—
flaw,

 

weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days

 

old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small

 

crowd of us
shifting forward, and—
in our shifting uniformly—it

 

being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind

 

single gesture—kowtow,
upheaval—there was
little difference. Some

 

took photographs; most
did a stranger thing: touched
briefly, without

 

distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less

 

for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe—given the lambs who

 

besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating

 

the dwindling contract
between the two,
the flies everywhere)—

 

maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand's instinct
to follow the eye, to

 

confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there—yes—but
I myself touched no one.


    A FORCE, AND WOULD CONSUME US


 

Because the lawn is not ours, I can
mind less
its destruction—

 

the pale grubs that become daily
more legion; and, tearing
at them,

 

the shimmering consequence of crows,
stiff chorus, each cast in the special
black

 

of bad news—only, always, what
is it?
Until that, too, not
mattering: winter soon,

 

and you—
and I—
We'll have left here,

 

changed presumably, to guess
from the steady
coming of us both to wanting, differently,

 

the body. Still, I want it
with you, steadfastness remains
one of my two gifts, the other

 

less gift, perhaps, than simply a matter
of I can't help it,
namely a knack for making anything

 

mean something.
You will have seen what
that leads to. Last night,

 

it was the train shedding town the way
every night it does, but
also, this time, like

 

answer: how easily can grow
routine even the chance any
train equals—Now

 

go     Now return           How could I
not wake you?
For reasons possibly not yours,

 

I want the sunset that
you want.
Of heroes,

 

what I most remember is
that gesture—in
defeat, victory, the same—that

 

each comes to:
regards, as if for the first time, his own hands.
Mutters, or is silent.

 

Translations are various: God,
If not for, If only—
Look what           I've done
.


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