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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips
Born in 1959, Carl Phillips' collection The Rest of Love won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry...
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FURTHER READING
Spring
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
A Blessing
by James Wright
Alcove
by John Ashbery
Another Attempt at Rescue
by M. L. Smoker
Birds Again
by Jim Harrison
Black Petal
by Li-Young Lee
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
Chansons Innocentes: I
by E. E. Cummings
City That Does Not Sleep
by Federico García Lorca
Diary [Surface]
by Rachel Zucker
Each year
by Dora Malech
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
Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth
Morning News
by Marilyn Hacker
National Poetry Month
by Elaine Equi
Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
by William Morris
Song On May Morning
by John Milton
Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]
by William Carlos Williams
Spring Day [Bath]
by Amy Lowell
Spring in New Hampshire
by Claude McKay
Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
spring love noise and all [excerpt]
by David Antin
Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze
Springing
by Marie Ponsot
The Enkindled Spring
by D. H. Lawrence
[O were my love yon Lilac fair]
by Robert Burns
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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.



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



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.
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