The Triumph of Song

--Rowan Ricardo Phillips

I mean, the only zone I think I might

Know, and by ‘know’ I mean ‘this thing hasn’t

Quite killed me yet’ is the triumph of song.

All my poems mean that, I think, really —

This is the edge of my observable

Universe: I can’t see what does not sing,

Or what I have not coaxed notes from out of

Thin air. Like the first time I must have heard

Strawberry Fields Forever. I was twelve

And cupped the soft black sponges to my ears

While sitting cross-legged on a friend’s twin bed

As the janky copy of the cassette

Copied over my memory of where

I was, with whom I was, and even who

I was. All I remember is the song,

All that confident lack of confidence,

Which is what making art is really like.

The dark blood zoning forward and backward

In the brain, the heart like grass in a bowl,

And the burning horizon’s sharp swagger

All of it part physics, part faith, part void.