Quotes from Carl Phillips

It was then we found ourselves too many fields away from where we'd meant to be, with regard to desire, to get there ever, even if—though this was not the case—we'd been told the way.

When was the burning that of fire? When was it fear? When sorrow? That any gesture can be understood as the necessary, mostly incidental price the body pays for whatever response comes past gesture, past the body that made it: to what extent can this be said, and it be true? and it be false? Under what conditions? Under whose conditions? Thus the waves. Thus the light of the sun across them.

As a scar commemorates what happened, so is memory but itself a scar.

There is a glamour, even to a thing undoing itself

afternoons I remember still: how the light seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living inside it, waiting— I'd heard all about that one clear note it gives.

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?

Fear. Things invisible, and the visible effects by which we know them.

about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind of choice.

Human gesture. Betrayed, betrayed.

from within their thicket of nowhere left to hide

It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama, what is ritual?

The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they made of love a wild god

As if sometimes the world really did amount to a quiet arrangement.

I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere to be found.

How they made out of shamelessness something beautiful, for as long as they could.

the way art can become, eventually, all we have of what was true.

And —already—you are leaving. You have crossed the water.

I closed my eyes. I dreamed again the dream called Yes: the worst is true .

for a moment, all bells ring true.

Poems are not the transcription of experience but the transformation of experience."-Carl Phillips @CPhillipsPoet

How at first a sweetness; how, by turns, a gift, a darkness.

There, beside the shifting fact of all that water. What's done is done.

Here — your shirt , he said, after. Lifting it. Bringing it to me as if it were not a shirt but a thing immaculate, or in flames, or— with a single sword positioned through it— a sacred heart.