Carl Phillips is the author of thirteen books of poems, most recently Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2020
Of California
We’d gone out walking among the sycamores. The dragonfruit cactuses, ornamenting the yards we walked past, hadn’t flowered yet, but soon would, the way what isn’t love at first feels […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
So the Edge of the World
Back then, we'd fall asleep to the wind at night. The wind was enough. I think we thought sleep meant rescue, and because sleep came easily, always unannounced, we were […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
The Same in Sun as It Felt in Shadow
Crownless now, intransitive, neither at rest nor not at rest between to be shaken and to be less shaken, in his head he's the magnolia's branches, he's the cast of […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2016
If You Go Away
When death finds me, if there be sight at all, let me see as the torn coyote does, turning its head briefly, looking not with understanding but recognition at where […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2016
Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers
Weapons thrown aside, despite duty; smell of sorrow recalling mostly the sea, even many years inland; lions devouring, right in front of you, your best horse: everything’s somebody’s history. Once, […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2016
His Master’s Voice
—See that’s the thing you’re not getting, though, the part about honesty being at worst a bruising experience, at best a bruisable one… ∎ ∎ I woke regretting everything all […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2016
Maybe So
Gently, though, gentle, my hand passing across the abandoned search-and-rescue map that the scars on his back resemble. What they say about attachment being a funnier beast than most of […]
Nature's Nature: A Gathering of Poetry
May/June 2015
Meanwhile, and Anyway
Otherwise, what of empathy, or any way to get there: upriver, and then what? Leaves, or the burst and fall of them, or just the stripped-by-now branches—comes to all the […]
Nonfiction
Fall 2014
Foliage
Eighteen years with a man I’d once credited with having saved me from losing myself—a man who still, despite increasing estrangement, comes the closest to what I’d call a soul […]
A SYMPOSIUM ON EMILY DICKINSON
Summer 2014
Hours
Familiarity is one way to think about what makes a home—a dailiness punctuated by routines that give a certain reliability to existence, or at least a perceived reliability. Routines are […]
The Kenyon Review Credos
Winter 2014
Foliage
I’ve just finished raking the leaves from around the bamboo and hosing down the flagstones free of bird shit from the birds that make the bamboo home—is this a form […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Stamina
—Wild West? Colorless birds lift up from the snarl and tangle of chaparral. Twice I’ve known the speed of love to exactly equal the speed of life itself. Not so […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Capella
I. I miss the sea. I miss the storms that stopped there. How much is luck, again opening, and luck shutting itself down, what we never expected, or only sort […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
In Which to Wonder Flew a Kind of Reckoning
So turned our backs to where woundable had come to mean therefore wounded. Stepped past bravery’s blurred, curtains-in-a-wind façade. A birdlessness, and yet, from the trees everywhere, the smallest sounds. … As […]
Poetry
Winter 2014
Last Night
Then he said it was like learning the hard way—as in, too late— that maybe recklessness is overrated, and though I disagreed, I did not say so. I disembarked instead. […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
In This World to Be Lost
Get dressed— We should leave, now. As for the so-called waters of persuasion, why not cast what’s left of belief upon them? As when we come to love a thing […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
Sky Coming Forward
How the birches sway, for example. How they tilt, on occasion, their made-to-tilt-by-the-wind crowns. How by then he had turned his head away, as if a little in fear; or […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
The Heat of the Sun
Calming the bell was nothing easy. Nor did the calmness, after, make the air surrounding it— though at first it had seemed to—any more still, or clear. The usual clouds […]
Poetry
Fall 2010
The Need for Dreaming
As a scar commemorates what happened, so is memory itself but a scar. As in: Given hunger, which is endless only until it isn’t, he destroyed what he could. And […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
Tell Me a Story
Maybe this is the prettiest time for it, each treebut a variation on the governing form, here,a leaflessness more like death than sleep, less likesinging than remembering what it meant, […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
The Life You Save
After the pinefields, there’s the marsh—you cansee it from here. And after that? Historyending; myth, as it starts to stir. And after that? ▪ ▪ After that, just the turning back again. Nothing […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
Next Stop, Arcadia
There’s a man asking to be worshipped only.He looks inconsolable; rugged; like thoseonce-popular, but hardly seen anymore,portraits—depictions, really?of Jesus.There’s another man. He wants to beflogged while naked and on all […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
Conquest
Speaking to himself, I think, not me, You have wantedmore than was yours to wish for, he said—as if evento wishing the laws of modesty and excess could be applied,and […]
Poetry
Winter 2009
Almost Tenderly
It had the heft of old armor—like a breastplateof bronze; like a shield, on hinges. It swung apartlike a door. Inside it, the sea was visible—the seaand, on the shore, […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Radiance versus Ordinary Light
Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it is violation—his own: he touches the bruises at each shoulder […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Affliction
The raptor's face hovers over my face. I've let risk sustain me this far before. I raise one arm, two arms; the bird circles— Chance entirely, how our gestures […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Erasure
Brindled, where what's left of the light finds him, he cowers in front of me: one way, as I remember it, that a body having grown accustomed to receiving punishment […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Like Stitches Where the Moths Have Made an Opening
Star-in-the-hand Cupped fire Fist, luminous. What keeps staying lost is not, anymore, the thing itself, but the definition it once provided, […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Here, on Earth
I. When the battle, like favor, shifts in Greek epic, there are smaller signs inside the large ones: an otherwise random soldier around whom none of the story apparently figures […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Hymns and Fragments
These are the gloves—of doeskin—he had specially made, after, and never wore. He’d shot the animal himself—unfairly, it seemed at the time; still seems so: crouched in a locust tree, […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
As a Blow, from the West
Names for the moon: Harvest; and Blue; and Don't Touch Me— and Do. I dreamed I had made a home on the side of a vast, live volcano, that the […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Regalia Figure
We were mistaken, I think. I think the soul wants no mate except body, what it has already, I think the body is not a cage, no, but the necessary […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Caravan
Clarion, boom-time, yes—though, more often, the almost-silence that the hum of activity everywhere now equals, cliché, everywhere, exaggeration, lines like It is as if I had known you forever, I […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Recumbent
Here, the ribs end, they—divide, into double fans. Splay. And fall. I believe the pictures—there must be, therefore, the heart underneath and off-centered, little down-beat, then not. The hair: important, […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
The Pinnacle
Having found a trail, we but followed. Technically, you followed me. How much is not what it looks like. I’m remembering parts so overgrown, I kept stopping to ask which […]
Poetry
Summer 1994
Glads
Three, at the most four days later, they’re dying, knuckled over at whichever flower has bloomed largest. The way everything beautiful finally breaks because of, from it. As if this […]
Poetry
Summer 1994
Cotillion
Every one of these bodies, those in drag, those not, loves a party, that much is clear. The blond with the amazing lashes—ashes, more amazingly, his own—tells me it is […]
Poetry
Summer 1994
Dream for Pilate
By morning, you’re down to the bed as a cross your cock as the essential first nail in the bloodwreck. Hasn’t this been done before, ask the two required bodies […]
Poetry
Summer 1994
Our Lady
In the final hour, our lady—Of the electric rosary, Of the highway, by then Of the snows mostly—was the man he’d always been really, though, yes, we’d sometimes forgotten. Still, […]
Poetry
Spring 1992
In the Blood, Winnowing
1 Before the dumb hoof through the chest, the fine hair of wire drawn over the head to snap free the neck’s blue chords, before the visionary falling away from […]
Poetry
Spring 1992
Memories of the Revival
On the fifth day, done with praying for long life, television skin, a little more ignorance on the part of whatever powers might be, done with squeezing divine allowancefrom the […]
Fall 2010
The Need for Dreaming; The Heat of the Sun
The Need for Dreaming As a scar commemorates what happened, so is memory itself but a scar. As in: Given hunger, which is endless only until it isn’t, he destroyed […]
Carl Phillips
A Conversation With Carl Phillips by KR poetry editor David Baker Carl Phillips has emerged in the past decade as one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric […]