Something to Believe In
My two hunting dogs have names, but I rarely use them. As
I go, they go: I lead; they follow, the blue-eyed one first, then
the one whose coloring—her coat, not her eyes—I sometimes
call never-again-o-never-this-way-henceforth. Hope, ambition:
these are not their names, though the way they run might suggest
otherwise. Like steam off night-soaked wooden fencing when
the sun first hits it, they rise each morning at my command. Late
in the Iliad, Priam the king of Troy predicts his own murder—
correctly, except it won’t be by spear, as he imagines, but by
sword thrust. He can see his corpse, sees the dogs he’s fed and
trained so patiently pulling the corpse apart. After that, he says,
When they’re full, they’ll lie in the doorway, they’ll lap my blood.
I say: Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere, the same people who
mistake obedience for loyalty think somehow loyalty weighs more
than hunger, when it doesn’t. At night, when it’s time for bed,
we sleep together, the three of us: muscled animal, muscled animal,
muscled animal. The dogs settle to either side of me as if each
were the slightly folded wing of a beast from fable, part power, part
recognition. We breathe in a loose kind of unison. Our breathing
ripples the way oblivion does—routinely, across history’s face.
Copyright © 2019 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 31, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“As one who has long lived with hunting dogs, I think a lot about their power, their animal-ness, and how quick we are to put trust in domestication, and to forget the wild aspects even to a domesticated animal. ‘Wild for to hold, though I seem tame,’ indeed. And when I say domesticated animal, I also mean, of course, those humans, too, with whom we share a bed, a life.”
—Carl Phillips
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.