Fixed Shadow, Moving Water

One friend tells me everything’s political,

another says nothing is, we just make it political.

By “we”, he means human beings, I assume—

what’s political to a fox curled in sleep,

or a pond, or a sycamore in winter with no leaves left

to stop the snow falling through it? I have loved you

for less time than I have loved some others,

but none more deeply than you; no one more

absolutely. Which, as if inevitably, amounts

to a hierarchy of sorts, doesn’t it? Value,

then the power that comes with it—soon enough,

the distribution of power, who gets to do the distributing…

But if we make of tenderness a countervailing force, the

two of us—

If we can make, from tenderness, a revolution—

This poem appeared in Then the War by Carl Phillips, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

10.09.2026

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