Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when
the coyotes roam the streets as if they've always
owned the place and had come back inspecting now
for damage. But what hasn't been damaged? History
here means a history of storms rushing the trees
for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star-
worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another's
suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
I understand it should, which is meant to be
different, I'm sure of it, from that pleasure
Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
a ship foundering at sea, though more and more
it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
the jetty's black ghost-finger, how it calms
the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half-wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out-it can still
feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
I the raft they steady. It seems there's no turning back.


About this poem
"There's the usual kind of swimming-as in, through water-and then there's that swimming that the mind always seems to be doing, I find. This poem feels to me a bit like both things, the combination of thrill and fear when there's finally no land in sight."
-Carl Phillips

About Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is the author of "Reconnaissance" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). He teaches at Washington University and lives in St. Louis, Mo.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Carl Phillips. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate