Excerpt from From the Devotions

NO KINGDOM

So little wakes you why
should a little rain,
or my leaving

to stand under it
and naked
because I can,

all neighbors down,
at last down,
for the dreaming, and

every waspdaily, the yard's
plague—gone,
returned to

whatever shingle or board
roofs their now
thrumless heliport.

Tremblefoot,
mumbler,
you've left

your glass on the porch-railing
neglect, as
what is fragile, seen

through,
but not at this hour empty:
the way disease does

the body, the way desire
can, or how God
is said to,

slowly rain fills the glass.
Never mind
that no kingdom was ever won

by small gestures:
I'm tipping the rainwater out.
The glass I'll put

here, where you'll find it.


ALBA: FAILURE

If the bare trees at the glass were kings
really, I would know they bend over in grief,
mourning their lost brilliant crowns that

they can only watch, not reach as, beneath them,
they let go of all color all flash all sway,
it would be better, I wouldn't have to say no

they are not kings, they are trees, I know this,
and if they bend it is wind only, it is nature,
isn't it also indifference? Passing yesterday

the bodies that, wrapped and wrapped, lay
sprawled above the steam as it left the vents
of my city, I could only fumble for the words

(dead lamb, dead lamb) to some song to sing
parts of, I gave, but what I gaveis it
right to say it helped no one, or can I say

I brought lullaby, sealed a thin life,
awhile longer, in sleep? What is failure?
Having read how there were such things as

orchard lamps for keeping the good fruit, on
colder nights, from freezing, I was curious
for that kind of heat go the lines from

a poem I never finished. The shorter version
is: once, twice, in a difficult time, I have
failed you. No poetry corrects this. But

does it mean we don't love? In the last poem
of you waking, I am any small bird, unnoticed,
above, watching; you are the traveler who

can't know (there is fog, or not stars, a steep
dark) that the all but given up for impossible
next town is soon, soon. Come. We turn here.

Copyright © 1997 by Carl Phillips. All rights reserved.