Carl Phillips

He Didn’t Raise Hand or Voice

Maybe so. Or maybe it’s only memory, in the end, that turns

some men into flags – anything from ownership to conquest

to Here I stopped to rest, once, but I couldn’t stay – while

others, years later, past the otherwise

mistake of them,

become reliable compasses we still half hold on to, their

bodies a forest when seen from the air in a small plane,

so that it’s possible to get close enough to see where the oaks

give way to poplar trees, or where, if you follow the pines

far enough, they open out to a field across which you can see

the ocean, we couldn’t have found our way here

without them:

in which case, where lies mistake, at this point, and where

revision? Last night, a friend asked if I could say, even roughly,

how many men I’ve ever slept with; and when, unable to,

I panicked, he assured me my situation is not uncommon.

Tonight I’m not

so sure. The lord gives to each of us only what

we can bear, says my father, during the weekly phone call

where I practice limiting myself to a single drink – one way,

I guess, of maybe keeping my hand in when it comes

to restraint. For once, I don’t push back at him, his faith;

if I can give him

that much, why shouldn’t I? If I say the giving

feels, impossibly, just before I let go of it, almost like love, that’s

all I’m saying. It happened; and now it’s over. They moved

together in groups, and singly. They moved among the trees

as among the parts of a language they’d forgotten they knew.

Miguel Murphy