Poet's Choice

because they are everywhere

to be found. They come to me like strays,

like the damaged, something that could know better,

and should, therefore -- but does not:

a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice -- an instinct for it,

or a habit at first, that

becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have

of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that.

Like one of those saints

on whom the birds once settled freely.

The poet customarily finds omens everywhere (and the person he is speaking to), calls that habit "a form of faith." Their conversation, along with its oblique and referential differences, also has its blunt moments: "You shouldn't look at me like that." The sentence can be heard as a kind of intimate teasing or something sharper than that.

The traditional Christian image of St. Francis, so benign and sanctified that the wild birds settle on him, emerges as if by association with the contrasting, ancient Roman image of birds as indicators of divinity. The poet associates the pre-Christian image with the pursuit of an art, finding meaning in the "strays" of apparently random experience. He seems to sacrifice, by choice or habit, the comfort of the later Christian image, preferring the restless pursuit of significance in whatever comes. In a nearly casual tone, Phillips explicitly defines his customary process of discovering meanings and connections among random, contrasting or disparate things. Then he demonstrates that process implicitly, by linking the anxieties of Roman augurs with the mysteries of St. Francis.

(Carl Phillips's poem "Custom" can be found in his book "Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006." Farrar Straus Giroux.

Copyright 2007 by Carl Phillips.)