THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Phillips
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Due to limitations of space, acknowledgments can be found at the end of the volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Patrick, [date]
[Poems. Selections]
Elegy for a broken machine : poems / Patrick Phillips.—First edition.
pages cm
“This is a Borzoi Book”—Title page verso.
ISBN 978-0-385-35375-5 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-385-35376-2 (eBook)
I. Title.
PS3616.H465A6 2015 811’.6—dc23 2014026436
Jacket image: E+/Getty Images
Jacket design by Oliver Munday
v3.1
For Ellen
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
Elegy for a Broken Machine
Four Haiku
Elegy Outside the ICU
Once
The Night Nurse Comes
Elegy with Oil in the Bilge
The Man
The Body
Work-Clothes Quilt
The Shoebox Hades
II
Mercy
Elegy with a Bronze Station Wagon
The Singing
Elegy After Midnight
Mattress
Barbershop
Elegy After a Suicide
Vesper Sparrow
Old Love
My Father’s Friends
My Grandmother
III
Elegy for Smoking
Alan the Plumber
The Guitar
Elegy at the Trinity Pub
Sunset Park
Elegy with Gasoline
Aubade
Spell Against Gods
Variations on a Text by Donald Justice
Will
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
I
Elegy for a Broken Machine
My father was trying
to fix something
and I sat there just watching,
like I used to,
whenever something
went wrong.
I kept asking where he’d been,
until he put down a wrench
and said Listen:
dying’s just something
that happens sometimes.
Who knows
where that kind of dream comes from?
Why some things
vanish, and some
just keep going forever?
Like that look on his face
when he’d stare off at something
I could never make out
in the murky garage,
his ear pressed
to whatever it was
that had died—
his eyes listening for something
so deep inside it, I thought
even the silence,
if you listened,
meant something.
Four Haiku
In the dark he grunts
The fuck you want? fists ripping
tubes out in his sleep.
*
I dream in my chair
he’s young: walking towards me,
squinting at the sun.
*
A P.A. hunches
in the half-light. I wake and
hear the Foley drain.
*
Out the window, rain.
Behind a paper curtain
someone worse off moans.
Elegy Outside the ICU
They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest
then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,
which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students
took turns cranking
a shiny metal jig
that split his ribs
just enough for them
to fish the heart out—
lungs inflating
and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines
as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries
with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg,
so that by almost every definition,
my father died
there on the table
and came back in the body
of his own father,
or his mother at the end,
or whoever it was
the morphine summoned
up out of the grave, into his dreams—
like that figure
in the floor-length mirror
he kept talking to
as we inched a fluid-hung
telemetry pole
past the endless open doors,
until he was finally close enough
to recognize a flicker
in those bloodshot eyes
and a quiver in the mumbling lips—
so slack and thin
he leaned a little closer
to catch their ghostly whisper
before he even
realized it was him.
Once
the father
of my son’s friend
watched his father die.
Then for some reason
came, still grieving,
to a soccer field where I,
a guy he knew,
or kind of knew,
stood with the others
trying not to stare
at the there-
but-for-the-grace-of-God-
go-I of him:
his eyes raw-rimmed
behind dark glasses
as herds of little bodies
shrieked and galloped
all around us—
whoever he was before
a trace, a remnant now,
shaking in the gray October wind:
the truth about love, about all of us,
so plain in him
there was nothing left
but to pretend
I was not watching
out the corner of my eye
when the muddy dog,
and the bouncing ball,
and the children
chasing after it
all seemed to veer
and disappear inside him.
The Night Nurse Comes
to take his pulse and shut off the alarm,
her pink nails leaving little jaundiced dents in his forearm.
Today he cannot eat or walk or read or speak.
His glazed eyes follow me around the room, and blink.
When I shake the cup of ice, he flicks his gray bird-tongue—
as she commands, under her breath, You must be the son.
Elegy with Oil in the Bilge
By the time we got out on the water
the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water
but a field of gray snow that we plowed
in one endless whi
te furrow of water,
skirting the rocks and wrecked trawlers
and abandoned old jetties just under the water—
my father in the bow, slick with fever,
whispering back to whatever the water
chattered and hissed through the hull—
until at last I saw lights on the water
and let the old Mercury rattle and sputter
its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water
as we drifted, at idle, the last time in his life,
through that beloved, indifferent harbor.
The Man
After his friends
rigged a pulley
and lowered the pack
of Kool menthols;
after he’d laughed
and then winced
and squinted up
at the trickle of dirt
dusting his lashes;
after his wife
had come sobbing
through the glare of the kliegs
and called down
to where the men pointed
how much she loved him;
after their son
sat cross-legged
at the edge of the hole
saying yessir,
yessir to whatever
came through the receiver;
after a gloved hand
had burst
through the clods and pale roots
and fastened the harness,
and tugged
for the lift to begin;
when he’d flashed
his thumbs-up
and heard the men roar;
when he’d answered
all the EMT’s questions,
and laid his head back
and sobbed, and thanked God,
and then felt his heart
finally, violently seize—
only then,
in the dark, sleeping house
before dawn,
looking up from the paper
as the last stars
faintly shined
in the skeletal arms
of the trees,
did I get a fleeting,
unspoken, yet
suddenly clear
sense of our real situation.
The Body
The house is dark
but the body glows.
It’s not the way it seems:
how what he was
is him again
each time the red clock blinks.
Soon the undertaker’s sons
will come and lift this
strangest of all strange things:
a palimpsest
of what we loved,
a nest in the brittle leaves.
It’s late, I know,
and the whole world waits
there, where you stopped to read,
and found us here,
and stared respectfully
out the window at the trees.
Work-Clothes Quilt
With nothing but time
and the light of the Singer,
and no one to come now forever
and rattle the bell
at the backdoor and scatter
black mud on the stoop,
and make that small moan
as he heaves off his boots—
with no one to fill
the big kettle and set it,
and fall asleep talking
to the back of her neck
as the treadle belt hums—
with nobody, nowhere
in need of such things,
she unbuckles his belt
for the last time
and cuts up his pant legs
and rips out the double-stitched seams,
making patches of plackets
and oil-stained pockets,
of kerchiefs, and collars, and sleeves,
her thin fingers setting the bobbin
and clamping the foot
until she’s joined every
scrap she can salvage,
no matter how brown
with his sweat, or stiff with his blisters,
or blooming his roses
of pine sap, and gear grease, and blood—
until,
as the wedding clock chimes
and his buried bones freeze,
as frost gleams
at sunrise in the window,
she stands by the bed
and breathes his last scent,
then wraps herself
in it and sleeps.
The Shoebox Hades
His little Lego
arms outstretched,
Aeneas stares
across the Styx,
watching his
clay father fade
into the glued-on
cotton mist.
What is there
to say? I love it.
I touch my son’s
soft neck,
and peer with him
into the depths
until his teacher
bellows Parents!—
which means it’s time
It’s time kiddo
for her to take
by his small wrist
the boy who clings
to me like death,
as if he knows:
it is no myth.
II
Mercy
Like two wrestlers etched
around some ancient urn
we’d lace our hands,
then wrench
each other’s wrists back
until the muscles ached
and the tendons burned,
and one brother
or the other grunted Mercy—
a game we played
so many times
I finally taught my sons,
not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done:
when the oldest rose
like my brother’s ghost,
grappling the little
ghost I was at ten—
who cried out Mercy!
in my own voice Mercy!
as I watched from deep
inside my father’s skin.
Elegy with a Bronze Station Wagon
Back when Miss Heidrich still
called up my mother
and asked for a turn in the carpool,
*
even when it meant stopping
by the school after chemo,
even when, some days, I’d heave open the door
*
and find my friend Jim,
with his veiny blue skull,
half-asleep on the sticky brown vinyl
*
that always reeked of his vomit
or the bleach that had cleaned it—
back when no one I knew ever died,
*
I used to just sit there
and laugh with my sister
and watch the powerlines race past the farms,
*
because nobody’d told us,
and I hadn’t yet even imagined
how soon, as we sat in a pew looking on,
*
she’d lean down and kiss him
just like in the driveway, I remember:
when he used to wake and climb into her arms.
The Singing
I can hear her through
the thin wall, singing,
up before the sun:
two notes, a kind
of hushed half-breathing,
each time the baby
makes that little moan—
can hear her trying
not to sing, then singing
anyway, a thing so old
it might as well
be Hittite or Minoan,
and so soft no one
would ever guess
that I myself once
sang that very song:
back when my son
> and then his brother
used to cry all night
or half the morning,
though nothing in all
the world was wrong.
And now how strange:
to be the man from next door,
listening, as the baby cries
then quiets, cries and quiets
each time she sings
their secret song,
that would sound the same ten
thousand years ago,
and has no
meaning but to calm.
Elegy After Midnight
Let the leftovers rot.
Let the last candle burn.
Let the clocks think
whatever they want.
This is the night,
says the night, you were given.
The hour, each hour,
you’ve lost.
So lean into me, love.
Kiss the blue children.
Come cast our brief
shadows together.
Let the wet branches lash
the black windows like death.
Elegy for a Broken Machine Page 1