AFTER WINNING THE WEST

1 7 R A F T E R W I N N I N G T H E W E S T C A R L P H I L L I P S They were what they’d always been – perhaps inevitably. As a gift is several things, yes, but it isn’t magic. Never mind everywhere the light sort of trembling, after. Soon enough, they’d return to knowing this, and have to stop mistaking themselves for what they did and did not resemble: archers on the wall of an Etruscan tomb, aiming at nothing, each astride a creature by now bodiless except for the hooves, barely visible, that could stand for anything, why not discipline, the stillness of it, just before leaving the hard ground far behind? ...