LIKE A LION

1 8 Y L I K E A L I O N C A R L P H I L L I P S Fallopian, estranged somehow, forgetless against a backdrop of plain sky, the limbs of the trees fail, and rally. Everywhere the kinds of patterns that should be breakable, but by now it’s been this way, it seems, forever. The wind strikes. The wind dies down. To amplify what’s true past recognition – never mind the cost . . . Hard to believe, though I do believe it, that that’s all pleasure meant, once. Why not? Why not be totally changed into fire, as they used to say, I say, to no one. Cargo; rift; nostalgia; gold. I fairly sway with my own aloneness, the only half-blinding after all and, therefore, not so unbearable flash of it, and the years of my life, reducible to a shuddering scant reflection in a body of water nowhere visible, stir, stir back. ...