Carl Phillips > Quotes

“Technically, the weight of pain is the weight of shadow.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“The sea/the same then as now: more blear than blue, more/blue than silver”
― Carl Phillips, Silverchest: Poems

“It was then we found ourselves too many fields away from
where we'd meant to be, with regard to desire, to get there
ever, even if—though this was not the case—we'd been
told the way.”
― Carl Phillips, Silverchest: Poems

“When was the burning that of fire?
When was it fear?
When sorrow?
That any gesture can be understood as the necessary, mostly incidental price the body pays for whatever response comes
past gesture,
past the body that made it:
to what extent can this be said, and it be true? and it be false? Under what conditions?
Under whose conditions?
Thus the waves. Thus the light of the sun across them.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Will it be salt or late light that it melts like?”
― Carl Phillips, Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006

“As a scar commemorates what happened, so is memory but itself a scar.”
― Carl Phillips

“There
is a glamour,
even to a thing undoing itself”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere
to be found.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Domestic

If, when studying road atlases
while taking, as you call it, your
morning dump, you shout down to
me names like Miami City, Franconia,
Cancún, as places for you to take
me to from here, can I help it if

all I can think is things that are
stupid, like he loves me he loves me
not? I don’t think so. No more
than, some mornings, waking to your
hands around me, and remembering
these are the fingers, the hands I’ve

over and over given myself to, I can
stop myself from wondering does that
mean they’re the same I’ll grow
old with. Yesterday, in the café I
keep meaning to show you, I thought
this is how I’ll die maybe, alone,

somewhere too far away from wherever
you are then, my heart racing from
espresso and too many cigarettes,
my head down on the table’s cool
marble, and the ceiling fan turning
slowly above me, like fortune, the

part of fortune that’s half-wished-
for only—it did not seem the worst
way. I thought this is another of
those things I’m always forgetting
to tell you, or don’t choose to
tell you, or I tell you but only

in the same way, each morning, I
keep myself from saying too loud I
love you until the moment you flush
the toilet, then I say it, when the
rumble of water running down through
the house could mean anything: flood,

your feet descending the stairs any
moment; any moment the whole world,
all I want of the world, coming down.”
― Carl Phillips, Cortège

“a language that, all this time, we knew.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“If I remember it, did it happen?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Here comes the word for mystery.
Here is the word for true.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm"

So that each
is its own, now--each has fallen, blond stillness.
Closer, above them,
the damselflies pass as they would over water,
if the fruit were water,
or as bees would, if they weren't
somewhere else, had the fruit found
already a point more steep
in rot, as soon it must, if
none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only
softens further those parts where flesh
goes soft.

There are those
whom no amount of patience looks likely
to improve ever, I always said, meaning
gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld--almost always
correctly
as it's turned out: how your hands clear
easily the wreckage;
how you stand--like a building for a time condemned,
then deemed historic. Yes. You
will be saved.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“In the meadow, in
adoration: am I not yours?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,
what is ritual?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Why does it seem
I won't come back here? Why speak of it

as of, already, a place I miss?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“I closed my eyes. I
dreamed again the dream
called Yes: the worst
is true.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“until
the image itself
has grown distorted past
all recognition save
that of memory”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“My earliest memory of humiliation is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember. Who can say how related this is to my refusal, all my life, to believe forgiveness exists?”
― Carl Phillips, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020

“Is there

no saving
what betrays itself?”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“There’s a light that can make
finding a thing look more than faintly
like falling across it—you must kneel,
make an offering. I threw my compass away
years ago. I have passed through that light.

—Carl Phillips, from “That it Might Save, or Drown Them”, Wild is the West (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux (January 23, 2018)”
― Carl Phillips, Wild Is the Wind: Poems

“Twin bells, those questions”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they

made of love a wild god”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“[...] You can treat the past / like a piece of fine glass to see yourself / reflected in; or to see through.”
― Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems

“A stillness like that of music resting—or sex,
after: what they call sadness, though it
is not sadness.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“And
—already—you are leaving. You have
crossed the water.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“How at first a sweetness;
how, by turns, a gift, a darkness.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Fear. Things invisible,

and the visible effects by which
we know them.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love

“Poems are not the transcription of experience but the transformation of experience."-Carl Phillips


@CPhillipsPoet”
― Carl Phillips

“for a moment, all bells ring true.”
― Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love