Black Swan on Water, in a Little Rain
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Black Swan on Water, in a Little Rain
Seen this way,through that lens where needand wanting swim at random
toward each other, away again, andnow and then together, he moves less likea swan—black, or otherwise—than like any
man for whom sex is, or has at last become,an added sense by which to pass ungently but moreentirely across a life where, in between the silences,
he leaves what little he's got to show for himselfbehind him in braids of water, green-to-blue wake ofPlease and Don't hurt me and You can see I'm hurt, already. [End Page 26]
Carl Phillips, Professor of English and former Director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University (St. Louis), is author of eleven books of poetry, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, Speak Low, and Double Shadow, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish during the spring of 2011. He is also translator of Sophocles' Philoctetes and author of Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry. The Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award are among the many honors his poetry has garnered for him. Phillips is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2010 he replaced Louise Glück as the judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
