Elegy with Table Saw & Cobwebs
- Elegy with Table Saw & Cobwebs
Rummaging the wood-rackI pull a cracked
old shingle off the stack:a scrap
on which atsome point, with his flat
knife-whittled pencil,my old friend Ollie scratched
5/32 + 1/2—a kind of riddle now, a workman’s artifact
unnoticed since thatyear the cancer cells attacked,
since whatever itonce meant,
whatever part it playedin some project,
went with him into the flames& ash.
Friends,we die like that:
the whole starry sky goes blackwhile these little nothings last,
while these spiders in the raftersgo on clutching their white sacks,
whispering & yet& yet & yet & yet
until I dust the fading rune& put it back. [End Page 171]
Patrick Phillips’s most recent collection of poems is Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of a book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), which won an American Book Award. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford University.
