What’s the point, now,
of crying, when you’ve cried
already, he said, as if he’d
never thought, or been told—
and perhaps he hadn’t—
Write down something
that doesn’t have to matter,
that still matters,
to you. Though I didn’t
know it then, those indeed
were the days.
Each had been terrible
enough to himself
already, to that truestself, inside, as only he
could know it, so it
seemed it shouldmatter less what ways
in particular they’d been
terrible to each other,or even that they’d been
terrible at all.
Carl Phillips, the former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, has often described poetry as a way to wrestle with ambiguity—to attempt to contain it. “Poetry is a form of control,” he once said. So Phillips chooses subjects—love, power, freedom, grief—that are particularly hard to grasp.