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  • The Shore, and: Correction
  • Carl Phillips (bio)

The Shore

Don’t be afraidDon’t goPassenger me back toa land called neither Honeycomb nor Danger— Yes, that’s what they kept whispering, as if in prayer (but to what, or whom?), or at least sometimes whispering, other times more loudly: You’re a memory You’rethe future You’re a memory as from a wilderness of [End Page 16] longing for something by now so clearly irretrievable (we look back once, I think, if we’re lucky—if twice lucky, we never look back again), their bodies meanwhile lifting, falling, sexual, like hammers, like a hammer thrown up into and across where the sky had begun—slowly, then more slowly—to seem too wrecked enough already to sustain more damage.

Correction

Two months deep into summer, the meadow inside me floods. Is flooded. Above it, the fireflies have come back, the way they’ve always done. Not faithfulness,

and not what isn’t. How long it’s taken me just to understand this—my whole life up to now, apparently. Stars; then only pieces of stars, that scatter. [End Page 17]

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of ten books of poems, most recently Speak Low.

“As for being a Boomer, I am grateful to have had the chance to know this country pre-Civil Rights, which has made it impossible for me to take those rights for granted. The wisdom gained from all that suffering may be a flawed one, but it is wisdom, all the same.”

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