Elegy for a Broken Machine (3 page)

And how kind

it used to make us

when we’d laugh

and throw our heads back

and watch the dragon’s breath

float from our mouths,

all ravenous and doomed.

Which is why I quit, of course,

like almost everyone,

and stay inside these days

staring at my phone,

chewing toothpicks

and figuring the bill,

while out the window

the smokers gather

in their same old constellations,

like memories of ourselves.

Or like the remnants

of some decimated tribe,

come down out of the hills

to tell their stories

in the lightly falling rain—

to be, for a moment, simply there

and nowhere else,

faces glowing

each time they lift to their lips

the little flame.

and his helper, Miguel,

hit a pothole

on Atlantic last Wednesday:

a nub of raw cartilage

peeking out through the septum

as he told me himself

how the airbag’s explosives,

and the dashboard’s gray shrapnel,

had blown the nose clear off his face,

over which the young doctors

laid a patch of wet skin

I could see they had cut

from his forehead:

a few gray eyebrow hairs

sprouting through the black stitches

as, deep in a mask

of oozing and swelling,

his big watery eyes

looked into mine,

like some child on Halloween night.

What is the meaning?

Where is the message?

Why have I dragged you

and poor Alan

together like this,

after all he’s been through?

There is everything we think

we know in the world.

And then there’s this shit

that just happens:

that falls from the sky,

or sprouts in our lungs,

or flies up from a windshield

without warning,

the whole planet charged

with the power

to open our bodies,

the way lightning lays bare

the pink, meaty striations

of heartwood, deep in a tree.

That’s it. That is all

I was thinking,

or trying hard not to think,

when Alan rolled

onto his back

and stared up at the drain,

his sweet, ruined face

turning to stone

in the torch’s blue flame,

while I stood over him

saying, as one knows

one must say,
I am

sorry. I’m so sorry,

by which, we both knew,

I meant
Jesus Christ. Jesus

fucking Christ, Alan, almighty.

It came with those scratches

from all their belt buckles,

palm-dark with their sweat

like the stock of a gun:

an arc of pickmarks cut

clear through the lacquer

where all the players before me

once strummed—once

thumbed these same latches

where it sleeps in green velvet.

Once sang, as I sing, the old songs.

There’s no end, there’s no end

to this world, everlasting.

We crumble to dust in its arms.

The beauty of the fisher-wife

in that sepia-toned tintype

stopped me on the stairs,

cradling my beer

as I squinted at a sea

of tiny schooners bristling

the St. John’s quay:

where she stared back at me,

a toddler almost hidden

in the folds of her skirt hem,

each hand a silver blur.

At work. At work,
I slurred,

full of pity for the lost:

for her, for us,

for everyone, I thought,

as I blew a groggy kiss

across the century,

and staggered on.

The Chinese truck driver

throws the rope

like a lasso, with a practiced flick,

over the load:

where it hovers an instant,

then arcs like a willow

into the waiting,

gloved hand

of his brother.

What does it matter

that, sitting in traffic,

I glanced out the window

and found them that way?

So lean and sleek-muscled

in their sweat-stiffened t‑shirts:

offloading the pallets

just so they can load up

again in the morning,

and so on,

and so forth,

forever like that—

like Sisyphus

I might tell them

if I spoke Mandarin,

or had a Marlboro to offer,

or thought for a minute

they’d believe it

when I say that I know

how it feels

to break your own

back for a living.

Then again,

what’s the difference?

When every light

for a mile turns

green all at once,

no matter how much

I might like

to keep watching

the older one squint

and blow smoke

through his nose?

Something like sadness,

like joy, like a sudden

love for my life,

and for the body

in which I have lived it,

overtaking me all at once,

as a bus driver honks

and the setting

sun glints, so bright

off a windshield

I wince and look back

and it’s gone.

The only one the snipers spared,

as their helicopter hovered

above the temple wall,

was a lanky young initiate

who sloshed the amber liquid

from a jerry can onto his head

then bowed formally, deliberately,

to all those watching

inside the circle of their scopes,

as he opened his eyes and stood upright

and touched the stick of smoking

incense to his robe.

It’s easy to pretend

that we don’t love

the world.

But then there is

your freckled skin
. Then:

your back’s faint

latticework of bones
.

I’m not saying this

makes up for suffering,

or trying to believe

that each day’s little ladder

of sunlight creeping

across the bed at dawn

somehow redeems it

for the thousand ways

in which we’ll be forsaken.

Maybe, sweet sleeper,

breathing next to me

as I scratch and scrawl

these endless notes,

I’m not saying anything

but what the sparrows out

our window sing,

high in their rotten oak.

Let them be vain.

Let them be jealous.

Let them, on their own earth,

await their own heaven.

Let them know they will die.

And all those they love.

Let them, wherever

they are, be alone.

And when they call out

in prayers, in the terrible dark,

let us be present, and watching,

and silent as stars.

I will die in Brooklyn, in January,

as snowflakes swarm the streetlamps

and whiten the cornices

of the sleeping brownstones.

It will be a Sunday like today

because, just now,

when I looked up, it seemed

that no one had ever

remembered or imagined

a thing so beautiful and lonely

as the pale blue city.

No one will stare up

at a light in the window

where I write this,

as taxis drag their chains

over the pavement,

as hulking garbage trucks

sling salt into the gutters.

Patrick Phillips is dead.

In January, in Brooklyn,

crowds of people stood

on subway platforms

watching snow

fall through the earth.

Yellow traffic lights

blinked on and off,

and only the old man

pushing a grocery cart

piled high with empty cans

stopped long enough

to raise his paper bag,

then took a swig, out of respect,

as a Cadillac turned slowly

in the slush, and slowly

made its way down Fulton.

Scatter my ashes at Six Mile Creek.

Where the slickrock turns to greenglide.

Where the blue striders streak.

Drag Billy Mashburn’s old johnboat

down the slope by the shore

as the sun dies and the moon climbs.

As light trails each dipped oar.

Scatter them there, where the ancient cans bleach.

Where the silt bed’s green blanket

drapes the ten thousand things.

With the leaf husk, with the pollen,

let them dust the cool creek,

and sink to that darkness

where the great darkness sleeps.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, where a number of these poems first appeared:

I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Drew University for giving me the time and peace to write. Special thanks to Ted Genoways, Tom Sleigh, and Joelle Biele for their friendship and encouragement. Thanks also to Deborah Garrison and everyone at Knopf, and to the many other friends who read these poems in manuscript—especially Ellen Brazier, Michael Collier, Brian Dempster, Jennifer Grotz, James Hoch, and C. Dale Young.

Also by Patrick Phillips

Poetry

Boy

Chattahoochee

Translations

When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt