Undo It

Carl Phillips

‘I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway’

Deep from within the changing colors of a life
that itself keeps changing, I know the leaves prove
nothing – though it
does seem otherwise – about
how helplessness is not a luxury, not a hurt by
now worth all the struggling to take back, but
instead what we each, inevitably, stumble
sometimes into,

and sometimes through … As for
that grove-within-a-grove that desire has, so long,
looked like – falling, proof of nothing, carrion-birds
clouding the slumped boughs of the mountain ash –

I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway – why not
in color? You’re no more to me a mystery, than I to you.





Last updated September 23, 2022