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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006...
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FURTHER READING
Spring
A Blessing
by James Wright
Another Attempt at Rescue
by M. L. Smoker
Birds Again
by Jim Harrison
Black Petal
by Li-Young Lee
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
City That Does Not Sleep
by Federico García Lorca
Diary [Surface]
by Rachel Zucker
Equinox
by Joy Harjo
From you have I been absent in the spring... (Sonnet 98)
by William Shakespeare
In cold spring air
by Reginald Gibbons
In the Memphis Airport
by Timothy Steele
Morning News
by Marilyn Hacker
National Poetry Month
by Elaine Equi
Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
by William Morris
Spring and All
by William Carlos Williams
Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze
Springing
by Marie Ponsot
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If a Wilderness  
by Carl Phillips
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Then spring came:
	           branches-in-a-wind. . .

I bought a harness, I bought a bridle.
I wagered on God in a kind stranger—
kind at first; strange, then less so—
and I was right.
	      The difference between
God and luck is that luck, when it leaves,
does not go far: the idea is to believe
you could almost touch it. . . .

		          Now he's
singing, cadence of a rough sea—A way of
crossing a dark so unspecific, it seems
everywhere: isn't that what singing, once,
was for?
          I lay the harness across my lap,
the bridle beside me for the sweat—the color
and smell of it—that I couldn't, by now,
lift the leather free of, even if I wanted to.

I don't want to.



Reprinted from Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 © 2007 by Carl Phillips, by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Learn more about FSG poets at fsgpoetry.com.


Audio Clip
September 18th, 2007
East Harwich, Massachusetts
From the Academy Audio Archive
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