Lost, Eyes Open [by Dante Micheaux]

“From that time forward a profound change set within me.”

                                                —Edward Carpenter, after reading Leaves of Grass

 

“Because you have, as it were, given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart…For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature.”

                                          —Edward Carpenter to Walt Whitman, July 12, 1874

 

When I read Carpenter’s autobiography, particularly passages on the experience of reading Walt Whitman, there was such a familiarity. Years ago, I too had what Will Self describes as an epiphanic moment of empathy, when I first read a poem by Carl Phillips. I will not mention the title of the poem, as Phillips has since annulled it, but it was the gateway to all of his poetry. He is the only poet whose work has evoked the same emotions in me as music does. Reading a poem like “Custom” is very much like listening to Jessye Norman sing “Thy Hand, Belinda” or Yolanda Adams sing “In the Midst of It All”—I know myself better having done so. It is an immense gift that poetry gives its readers and why we must never lose it. Here is Carl Phillips at his best:

Parable

 

There was a saint once,

he had but to ring across

water a small bell, all

 

manner of fish

rose, as answer, he was

that holy, persuasive,

 

both, or the fish

perhaps merely

hungry, their bodies

 

a-shimmer with

that hope especially that

hunger brings, whatever

 

the reason, the fish

coming unassigned, in

schools coming

 

into the saint’s hand and,

instead of getting,

becoming food.

 

I have thought, since, of

your body—as I first came

to know it, how it still

 

can be, with mine,

sometimes. I think on

that immediate and last gesture

 

of the fish leaving water

for flesh, for guarantee

they will die, and I cannot

 

rest on what to call it.

Not generosity, or

a blindness, trust, brute

 

stupidity. Not the soul

distracted from its natural

prayer, which is attention,

 

for in the story they are

paying attention. They

lose themselves eyes open.

Epigraph 1: Carpenter, Edward. My Days and Dreams. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1916.

Epigraph 2: Traubel, Horace. With Whitman in Camden. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.

"Parable": Phillips, Carl. Quiver of Arrows. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.