What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until – innocent,
with art for once

not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next

in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid

between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through

air a path invisible, but there ...
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,

it is the unsubstantial – that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it – that most bewilders,

even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more

than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,

his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,

later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.

From Carl Phillips, The Tether, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
This poem first appeared in The Nation.

• L13 522: Poetry Workshop (SP2006, FL2006)
• L13 522: Poetry Workshop (SP2006, FL2006)