[extreme environments]

Carl Phillips

I’ll Miss Most What I Loved Best

              In spring especially, when

the pear tree’s petals, backlit, as they’re blown

through the air, can make tenderness

for once seem an easy thing: just particularity

made visible— though faint,

                                             the colors… Last night,

I was running alone through a forest, lost. The rustle

of already-trampled leaves versus that of the leaves

that were just then falling and, at the same time,

singing, each one

                            the same song, but each

in its own private pitch. To have mis-

understood myself has changed everything,

they sang to the earth that, in turn,

received them

                       in a silence through which

the leaves, impossibly, could hear

nevertheless an answering song, as if the earth

were singing: Keep close, forever. Until each

had sworn to it, and that it must be real—

that they’d made

                           nothing up. The way what

we remember of childhood— our own, anyway—

becomes our childhood: splayed irises, like good

intentions torn open; the sting of the face,

the hand rising to strike again; the meadow

at night,

              rippling darkly, like water. They say the moon

is moving slowly away from us. Desolation,

lonely— them’s fancy words to be

tossing around, boy, on such a soft, dark night.

Adam Peterson