Carl Phillips

For Night to Fall
May 13, 2012 Phillips Carl

For Night to Fall

 

You could tell from the start that the best

were frailing.  We made the wishes we made,
beside the wishes we also hoped would
come true, for there’s always a difference,

the way what we remember of what happened
is just memory, not history exactly, and
not the past, which is truth, but by then

who cared?  The truth by then as a snowy
owl becoming steadily more indistinguishable
from the winter sand in twilight, feathered

emptiness filling/unfilling itself for no one,
no apparent reason – who?  who says?
who says the dead are farther away from me

than you are? – across the hard, hard shore.

Carl Phillips is the author of, most recently, Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018).