THE BEST OF THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1988-1997 by Harold Bloom

Author:Harold Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER POETRY
Published: 1998-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Mathematics of Breathing

CARL PHILLIPS

I

Think of any of several arched

colonnades to a cathedral,

how the arches

like fountains, say,

or certain limits in calculus,

when put to the graph-paper’s cross-trees,

never quite meet any promised heaven,

instead at their vaulted heights

falling down to the abruptly ending

base of the next column,

smaller, the one smaller

past that, at last

dying, what is

called perspective.

This is the way buildings do it.

II

You have seen them, surely, busy paring

the world down to what it is mostly,

proverb: so many birds in a bush.

Suddenly they take off, and at first

it seems your particular hedge itself

has sighed deeply,

that the birds are what come,

though of course it is just the birds

leaving one space for others.

After they’ve gone, put your ear to the bush,

listen. There are three sides: the leaves’

releasing of something, your ear where it

finds it, and the air in between, to say

equals. There is maybe a fourth side,

not breathing.

III

In my version of the Thousand and One Nights,

there are only a thousand,

Scheherazade herself is the last one,

for the moment held back,

for a moment all the odds hang even.

The stories she tells she tells mostly

to win another night of watching the prince

drift into a deep sleeping beside her,

the chance to touch one more time

his limbs, going,

gone soft already with dreaming.

When she tells her own story,

Breathe in,

breathe out

is how it starts.

1994

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