down the slope by the shore
as the sun dies and the moon climbs.
As light trails each dipped oar.
Scatter them there, where the ancient cans bleach.
Where the silt bed’s green blanket
drapes the ten thousand things.
With the leaf husk, with the pollen,
let them dust the cool creek,
and sink to that darkness
where the great darkness sleeps.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, where a number of these poems first appeared:
American Poetry Review: “The Body,” “Elegy After Midnight,” “Elegy for a Broken Machine,” “Elegy for Smoking,” “Four Haiku,” “Mattress,” “Old Love,” “Once,” and “The Shoebox Hades”
Ecotone: “The Singing”
Narrative: “Elegy at the Trinity Pub,” “Elegy with a Bronze Station Wagon,” “My Grandmother,” and “The Night Nurse Comes”
New England Review: “Elegy After a Suicide,” “Elegy Outside the ICU,” “Elegy with Oil in the Bilge,” “Spell Against Gods,” “Variations on a Text by Donald Justice,” and “Will”
Slate: “Alan the Plumber”
Tikkun: “Aubade”
Virginia Quarterly Review: “The Man,” “Mercy,” “Vesper Sparrow,” and “Work-Clothes Quilt”
“The Guitar” received the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America and first appeared at www.poetrysociety.org.
“Spell Against Gods” received a 2011 Pushcart Prize and appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses.
“Elegy with Oil in the Bilge” was reprinted in Ted Kooser’s newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry,” July 2012.
I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Drew University for giving me the time and peace to write. Special thanks to Ted Genoways, Tom Sleigh, and Joelle Biele for their friendship and encouragement. Thanks also to Deborah Garrison and everyone at Knopf, and to the many other friends who read these poems in manuscript—especially Ellen Brazier, Michael Collier, Brian Dempster, Jennifer Grotz, James Hoch, and C. Dale Young.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Phillips is the author of two poetry collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, which won the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His honors include both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Discovery/The Nation Prize from the 92nd Street Y, and the Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.
Also by Patrick Phillips
Poetry
Boy
Chattahoochee
Translations
When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt
Elegy for a Broken Machine Page 3