Snow Globe
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I
Whatever falls is a thing descending. But descent doesn’t have to mean to fall. About nostalgia, I am still against it. By morning, there was no evidence of what had happened between us, or not happened. How everything depends. The sound of bees beginning to stir a last time all over again in the walls of a house left wintering. A little wind through the pines in stereo, making the limbs stiffly rise, like memorials, for those who choose to remember what’s over in that particular way, though I’ve never chosen it, and do not now. My requirements, they’re what they’ve always been: a name I can use when riding shotgun; then there’s my secret name. I’m not the man I knew.
II
And now the rain in soft strokes coming down, seeming to whisper of deaths that weren’t that heavenly after all, of lives cracked open first, gutted—some of us fuck and call it making love, for some it’s the other way round—then cast aside. You could do worse, and probably will, he says to me, I say to him, he says, and I say back. Even if the skitter of leaves in autumn can be called proverbial—if I’m not, for example, the man I knew—it is no less real, [End Page 341] any of it. Otherwise, what history have I got, with which to shadow us in context, lost ponies in a storm that’s blinding, blinding. It blinds us both.
III
I keep waiting for change, as opposed to the sign for change where it’s occurred already and I’m again too late. I keep pretending it makes no difference when the moon goes that do-what-you-must shade of red that there’s no real name for. As for how it feels, or can sometimes: like a life, like life itself, descending—sand cherry, chestnut, river birch, dogwood, pear . . . All night, I ride shotgun side by side with the ghost I call failure, for whom gesture, if not entirely the one language left, is the only one he still trusts, though there are times, even now, I forget this: he takes my hand, and I hold it— tight. And I turn my face away.
IV
Stumbling by moonlight upon your shadow-self—that man you knew, or thought you did—see if he stirs, first. Is he dead, or close to? If so, you could do worse than to stroke him as you would the brow of a broken pony, brushing away the flies that you choose to call, instead, bees as they ascend and hover slightly above the open wound, its red business . . . Why should your requirements change from what they’ve always been? Stay as blind as ever to the particular form of failure that is still nostalgia. Turn his face away. Let memory be the only piece of evidence that you hold onto. Not leaves, but—what is no less real—the ghosts of leaves. Do what you must, but softly, soft as rain just beginning to turn to snow at the cusp of winter.—Don’t worry. This, too, is love. [End Page 342]
Carl Phillips, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, is author of over ten volumes of poems, including Double Shadow, Speak Low, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986–2006, The Rest of Love, Rock Harbor, and The Tether. He is also author of Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry and translator of Philoctetes, a tragedy by Sophocles. In addition to being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Phillips has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Academy of American Poets, and the Library of Congress. In 2010, he was appointed judge of the Yale Younger Series of Poets. He is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he once served as Director of the Creative Writing Program.
