If a Wilderness
Then spring came:
branches-in-a-wind. . .
I bought a harness, I bought a bridle.
I wagered on God in a kind stranger—
kind at first; strange, then less so—
and I was right.
The difference between
God and luck is that luck, when it leaves,
does not go far: the idea is to believe
you could almost touch it. . . .
Now he's
singing, cadence of a rough sea—A way of
crossing a dark so unspecific, it seems
everywhere: isn't that what singing, once,
was for?
I lay the harness across my lap,
the bridle beside me for the sweat—the color
and smell of it—that I couldn't, by now,
lift the leather free of, even if I wanted to.
I don't want to.
Reprinted from Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 © 2007 by Carl Phillips, by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Learn more about FSG poets at fsgpoetry.com.
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips’ most recent books are Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). His numerous honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets and Writers, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. Phillips served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2006 to 2011. He is currently a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.