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Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips
Born on July 23, 1959, Carl Phillips's 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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Porcelain

 
by Carl Phillips

As when a long forgetfulness lifts suddenly, and what
we'd forgotten—as we look at it squarely, then again
refuse to look—is our own
                                            inconsequence, yes, it was
mostly like that, sex as both an act of defacement and—
as if the two were the same thing—votive offering,
insofar as the leaves
                                     also were a kind of offering, or could
at least be said to be, as they kept falling the way leaves
do: volitionless, from different heights, and in the one direction.






From Speak Low by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2009 by Carl Phillips. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.
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