Rock Harbor

The wind was high—it gave to your

hair a lift in equal parts gradual,

steep, disarming—

I love a storm,

and said so; by I have always

loved better the wreckage after,

I did not mean instead of, but

a preference.

To the air, an edge

anyone would call arctic—isn't

that why we left it nameless? To

your face, a look I'd admired before

in the bodies of those who seem

not so much indifferent as made

ignorant, or stunned as if by

sudden luck, or else repentant and

in payment, somehow, for what

all price falls like an irrelevance,

a stole, an expensive sail in a

calm away from. Sex

as a space available where neither

loss nor regret figures—imagine

that.

Or not having, finally, to take

anything away—in the form of

photographs of the mostly ice

that the harbor's water, the shore

past that, the street after had

become; or as words like those

that came to me: green, kind of,

lit almost, by as if from within

in places, a spill but

an arrested one, less force than

the idea of it, block and edge like

the chance for pattern, but

spent now or only, from the very

start, false

—false and singing.

The wind was high; it exaggerated

what you were already, a man

returning toward shelter he can't

see yet, but believes just ahead

exists, the sort of man for whom to

doubt at all is treason. By

not unfaithful, I understood I

could mean both things: I'd do

nothing I'd promised not to—

Also, there is nothing I'll forget.

Copyright Credit: Carl Phillips, "Rock Harbor" from Rock Harbor. Copyright © 2002 by Carl Phillips. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved.

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Source: Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)