Fray — by Carl Phillips

There it lay, before me, as they had
said it would: a distance
I'd wish to cross,

then try to, then leave
off wishing. Words like arc,
and trajectory. And push. The words

themselves over time
coming to matter
the way, in painting, color does: less,

finally, than the gesture
each stroke
memorializes.

A kind of sleep
that will look like death,
they said,

A kind of waking that will look
bewildered.
I woke,

as it were. I was not
bewildered. The distance as uncrossed
as it had been,

but now a clarity—like that
of vision. A kind of crossing.
Parts that the light

reached, relative
to everything else, what the light
kept missing. Spirea

in a wind; wind in the spirea's
leggy branches—I could make
distinctions: weeping

spruce; weeping maple. I could love you
as I had loved you—as only
humans can love each other: it's

a human need,
to give to shapelessness
a form.