Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper

The Glade

Here, complete with half-swallowed cry
of small game rising, stirring
the light, is that ease

with which a legend goes
languorously down on itself,
slow-dying;

this is the air left behind, thick
with the whir of bees flagging, smell
of meadow that’s spent all its arrows,

where every dream is
of difficult breathing, of desire
as a finally grounded bird

whose limbs and blue-black wings
dangle from the dreamer’s mouth,
refusing to come loose…

Here,
where his body lay, gather up all
the broken-stemmed flowers;

photograph the water, that in
the wind repeatedly makes for shore
and misses—

these, for dark Narcissus
who, whatever else and more
he may have been,

was never ours.

Published:

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of ten books of poetry. His most recent is Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). His Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. (updated 10/2025)

Phillips’s book In the Blood was reviewed in AGNI 41 by Erin Belieu. Phillips’s book Cortège was reviewed in AGNI 44 by Kathy Fagan.

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