Quotes from Carl Phillips

.....science-based popular education can have an enormous impact on politics.

Why does it seem I won't come back here? Why speak of it as of, already, a place I miss?

The light extends like truth, the truth like a hand extending at the same time as it recedes. What is that like?

In the meadow, in adoration: am I not yours?

If I remember it, did it happen?

until the image itself has grown distorted past all recognition save that of memory

traced far enough, past hope, back across belief, it ends always at desire

Radiance unrelenting— no peace, no shadow, no shelter now—

Twin bells, those questions

Poems that sustain our contemplation, disrupt our complacencies, and leave us changed" -Carl Phillips

Sometimes, I think I dreamed it, or I am saying it like a thing that I would do, when I would never, and calling it art.

Star-in-the-hand Cupped fire Fist, luminous.

The younger one is almost handsome, a star already, going down.

I'd remember the way everyone else does: later, when none of it matters, memory as good as a mirror for changing things, no good at all

And now it is as we wanted it.

A stillness like that of music resting—or sex, after: what they call sadness, though it is not sadness.

Like asking at first Where am I after dream—and the room, in pieces, slow, comes back

a language that, all this time, we knew.

Here comes the word for mystery. Here is the word for true.

There's a light that can make finding a thing look more than faintly like falling across it—you must kneel, make an offering. I threw my compass away years ago. I have passed through that light. —Carl Phillips, from "That it Might Save, or Drown Them", Wild is the West (?Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 23, 2018)

How they madeout of shamelessness somethingbeautiful, for as long as they could.

Technically, the weight of pain is the weight of shadow.

The sea/the same then as now: more blear than blue, more/blue than silver

Will it be salt or late light that it melts like?