By Carl Phillips
(posted Wednesday, Nov. 11, 1998)
To hear the poet read “Gesture, Possibly Archaic,” click here.
Careful confident both, and
prone, the two of them, to
laughing, they got
into the boat.
One put his hands to the oars
there, and the boat
left.
The other, raising
against wind his collar,
freed unmeaningly a litter of thin
blossoms that could be
peach, or the little apple that–for
how slow it is, coming
sweet–is called
reluctance …
The blossoms spilled
first onto wind, then
onto the water behind the boat, and
for a while
the water flared
outside of a stillness it
would return to:
A boat meant nothing in that country;
the men won’t, either
one of them, be missed–
