For me the dappled morning where night's coolness lingers a while is the best of the day, until that dimming hour of dusk when the blaze has gone down and the first faint stars appear. But that isn't day at all. It is night beginning to devour the roses and the world's other details, leaving intact only dark forms that loom in silence. The winding down has a serenity day cannot equal, but by night I always remember the roses, lost in the darkness, the essence of melancholy.
Sunday Verse
A Summer
by Carl Phillips
The latest once-more-with-feeling-please
manifestation of letting go, cadence of wings
folding, unfolding, nights at the pier, nights
beneath it, boat-rower, finder of lost things,
bodies at sea, the body as itself a sea,
crossed wherever crossable, makes me feel
so much better about my self makes me
feel good, as by arrangement, as of arms
and legs, as for an altarpiece in the sand,
ritual resting as much in the details, careful,
easy, as in what we make of them, the eye, if
faltering, not failing quite, X for speak no more,
for love also, also his mark, you'll forget me
only when I say you can, a rosewater X at
each wrist in the style of rope-work, restraint,
release from it, slavery is dead, everyone
saying so, singing it, believing it, let them –
a lovely rumor. Then summer was over.
