Western Edge
I need you
the way astonishment,
which is really just
the disruption of routine,
requires routine.
Isn’t there
a shock, though—
a thrill—
to having done
what we had to?
Unequally, but
in earnest, we love
as we can,
he used to mumble,
not so much his
mouth moving,
more the words
themselves sort of
staggering around lost
inside it . . . Now
show me
exactly what
you think being brave
is.
Copyright © 2023 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 7, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I think this poem is circling the idea of what to make of where we find ourselves, later in life, and how to move forward without regret, which is maybe a kind of courage.”
—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.