quiet tommaso (original) (raw)

TRADE

by Carl Phillips

Bending - as no
flower bends -
casting the difficult rule

of his attention upon an elsewhere
that accordingly broke open
into a splendor that, too,

would pass,
I am resigned, mostly,

said the emperor,
to a history between us less of loss than, more protractedly, of losing -

and, having said as much, said
nothing else to the man to
whom he'd said it;

whom, for years now, he'd called
variously paramour,
consort,

sir; who, for
himself, said nothing;
who from where he was seated could

see, and easily,
each at its labeled and color-coded slip
moored slackly,

the bows of the ships of the Fleet
Imperial, about which
what he found, just

then, most worth admiring it
is impossible, anymore, to
say exactly:

the trim of them,
flawless, sleek - reminiscent, in
that way, of almost any line from Ovid; or

when there was wind,
how the bows tipped,
idly,

in it;
or the stillness, afterwards,
that they found; or the way they seemed to.