Why So This Quiet
Dog lifts his leg to piss on the bull briar; pisses;
and up from the twists and thorns flies a ghost moth,
two of them, three, moving like an abandoned
but still persuasive, still shifting argument,
until as usual they move how they move, even as
the field’s edge means the edge of the field, not
the shadow-stitched perimeter of childhood
where someone’s explaining to me all over again
“A whip is not a lasso,” losing patience,
while someone else strikes a match, sets fire
to a box of maple leaves—desire—“No,
the leaves are what desire looks like, not how it feels.”
Copyright © 2022 by Carl Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The opening image of this poem actually happened—a moth flew free of the area where my dog had relieved himself. It got me thinking about all the lives going on that we don’t think about, and how randomly those lives can get disrupted and disclosed. It seems to me that memory works this way, some incidental moment setting a buried memory—here, a scrap of remembered dialogue, but from whom, and where?—into motion, up toward the surface, into the light of remembering what had lain hidden (but why?).”
—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.