No Kingdom

So little wakes you — why
should a little rain,
or my leaving

to stand under it
and naked
because I can,

all neighbors down,
at last down,
for the dreaming, and

every wasp — daily, the yard’s
plague—gone,
returned to

whatever shingle or board
roofs their now
thrumless heliport.

Tremblefoot,
mumbler,
you’ve left

your glass on the porch-railing
—neglect, as
what is fragile, seen

through,
but not at this hour empty:
the way disease does

the body, the way desire
can, or how God
is said to,

slowly rain fills the glass.
Never mind
that no kingdom was ever won

by small gestures:
I’m tipping the rainwater out.
The glass I’ll put

here, where you’ll find it.

From From the Devotions. Copyright © 1998, 2002 by Carl Phillips. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

*

It’s intriguing to look back on an older poem like this, and to try to sort out how it came to be written. I tell my students that not only does relatively little actually happen in a poem, but that it doesn’t take any great event to generate a poem. This one began with a bad habit I have, of watching the beloved in bed when he’s sleeping. For some reason, I think we see people at their most innocent at that time, or maybe most transparent – the face seems cleared of expression, especially the kinds that we automatically assume when we’re awake and interacting with others.

Watching my then partner shake in his sleep, mumble to himself in dream – that’s how this poem began, while I lay in bed beside him, listening to the rain, then decided to go downstairs, stand naked on the porch (not in the rain, though – the poem fudges that); and there it was, the glass he’d forgotten to bring back into the house…

The ‘magic’ part, for me, happens when the ordinary gets transformed. The glass becoming talismanic – being filled like a body – the rain also, now as disease, now as God…

So I guess you could say a fair amount of this poem is literally what happened. The ‘magic’ part, for me, happens when the ordinary gets transformed. The glass becoming talismanic – being filled like a body – the rain also, now as disease, now as God…My own favorite moment of transformation is the “thrumless heliport” that the wasps’ home becomes – something that wouldn’t likely have happened if I hadn’t been living, at the time, very near a hospital from which helicopters were constantly lifting, night and day…

I have never known how to take that final gesture, of putting the emptied glass “here, where you’ll find it.” Where, exactly? Back on the rail? In the kitchen? But I think of it as a tender gesture, a way of letting the beloved know that someone else – I – was here. But is the speaker leaving it as a final message before leaving the relationship? If the beloved is a kind of kingdom, and if gestures can’t win a kingdom, then isn’t the gesture pointless, and isn’t the loss of the kingdom implied already?

The poem comes from my book From the Devotions, where I was trying to explore the idea of devotion, not just spiritual, but in terms of fidelity, devotion between two people. I think the poem ends ambiguously – love is definitely there, but how or what it can accomplish remains unclear. And hasn’t that been, for me at least, the way?

—Carl Phillips, Saint Louis, October 31, 2013

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including most recently “Silverchest” (FSG, 2013) and “Double Shadow” (2011), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His earlier collections include “A Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems” (2007), “Riding Westward” (2006), “The Rest of Love” (2004), “Rock Harbor” (2002) and “The Tether,” which won the Kingsley Tufts Award in 2002. He is also the author of “Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry” (Graywolf Press, 2004), and a translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (Oxford University Press, 2003).

“From the Devotions” (Graywolf Press, 1998), the book in which “No Kingdom” first appeared, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Carl Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

If in New York, Carl Phillips will be reading and in conversation with Charif Shanahan at Queens College this Monday, 4 November. Details here. Brought to you by the Queens College MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation and our friends at the Poetry Society of America.

Editor’s Rec: PBS Newshour’s Jeffrey Brown in conversation with Carl Phillips (2008) here.

Also read: Dan Chaisson on Silverchest (New Yorker, 4/15/20013).†

†Requires subscription.