#Carl Phillips

[soracities]

Carl Phillips, "Fixed Shadow, Moving Water", Then the War: New and Selected Poems [ID'd]

[sfsolstice]

Carl Phillips, from "Everything All of It," in Then The War

[deputy-buck]

[havingapoemwithyou]

fixed shadow, moving water by Carl Phillips

[kiisuuumii]

Carl Phillips, from "If You Go Away," in Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020

[goreprofonde]

In myths, we call it love. Call it desire to soften the god who finds a boy, leads him far from home, claps a cup in his hand and demands Bend to my will, child, you’ll be adored— To turn that god merely animal. To render instinctual his greed, to make of him a man barely culpable, so that we might command a tale that only pleases us: there is no terror in it, glossing over the sliced-out hole in the family photos, the missing child whose pain goes unremarked, silenced by a bolt of lightning, or the shriek of an eagle, its counter- feit wings snatching a boy out of his life, then making that boy serve him, forever.

- Paisley Rekdal, Gokstadt/Ganymede.

[dk-thrive]

Anger confusable with sorrow, sorrow canceling all the anger out … It's the past, and it isn't. It's forever. And it isn't.

— Carl Phillips, from "Civilization", Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 1, 2022)

[namedvesta]

— Carl Phillips, from Cortège (𝟤𝟢𝟢𝟤).

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guillaume Seignac (1870-1924)

* * * *

If I believed in a god, he would be a sea god, like the sea in its predictability—now approach, now recede—beneath such a god I would not mind, I think, being the shore, say of the sea what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss without which what strategies would there be for softening the hollowness that any victory, give it time, comes with, how curb the risk of arrogance, with its doomed but not undangerous hound, complacency?

— Carl Phillips, from “To Be Worn Openly at the Wrist, or at the Chest and Hidden”

[alive on all channels]

[othellho]

— Carl Phillips, Luck

[the-final-sentence]

It's the brokenness itself, the incompleteness of who we were, I think, that made the whole thing work.

Carl Phillips, from "Last Call"

[malaisequotes]

“—So here we are again, one-handedly fingering the puckered edges of the exit wounds memory leaves behind.”

Givingly by Carl Phillips

[mythologyofblue]

The sea

the same then as now: more blear than blue, more

blue than silver

-Carl Phillips

[whisperthatruns]

I have a story, the falcon says, seems to, the wings lifting, the feathers rippling with a story's parts---I have a story; I can't wait to tell you.

Carl Phillips, from “Wake Up,” Star Map with Action Figures (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019)

[amiablesummer]

Memory as a wound

Katherine Larson, "Lake of little birds" from Radical Symmetry (via @feral-ballad) // George Seferis, tr. Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard, "Memory I" // Alex Eckman-Lawn, A Cut Paper Collage (via @satanasaeternus) // Carl Phillips, "Givingly" from Wild is the Wind: Poems // Yves Olade, "Hunter's Moon" from Bloodsport // Rosario Castellanos, "Memory of Tlatelolco"

[dk-thrive]

Other than that, all was still — a quiet so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and words the way to break it, they began speaking. They spoke of many things: / They said it would hurt, and it does.

— Carl Phillips, from "A Little Closer Though, If You Can, For What Got Lost There", Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 1, 2022)