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  • Will, and: Elegy with Oil in the Bilge
  • Patrick Phillips (bio)

Will

Scatter my ashes at Six Mile Creek.

Where the slickrock turns to greenglide. Where the blue striders streak.

Drag Billy Mashburn’s old johnboat down the slope by the shore

as the sun dies, and the moon climbs. As light trails each dipped oar.

Scatter me there, where the ancient cans bleach.

Where the siltbed’s green blanket drapes the ten thousand things.

With the leaf husk, with the pollen, let me dust the cool creek.

Let me sleep in that darkness where the great darkness sleeps. [End Page 34]

Elegy with Oil in the Bilge

By the time we got out on the water the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water

but a field of gray snow that we plowed in one endless white furrow of water

as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers and abandoned old jetties just under the water,

while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever, whispering back to whatever the water

chattered and hissed through the hull— until at last there were lights on the water

and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water

as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life, through that beloved, indifferent harbor. [End Page 35]

Patrick Phillips

Patrick Phillips is currently a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His first book, Chattahoochee (University of Arkansas Press, 2004), received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. His second book, Boy, was published in the VQR Poetry Series in 2008. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

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