Poetry: The Sea, the Forest
Fronds and Furls by Christina Mrozik
Like an argument against keeping the more unshakable varieties of woundedness inside, where such things may best belong, he opened his eyes in the dark. Did you hear that, he asked . . . I became, all over again, briefly silver, as in what the leaves mean, beneath. I could hear what sounded like waves at first, then like mistakes when, having gathered momentum, they crash wavelike against the shore of everything a life has stood for. —What, I said.
From Wild Is the Wind by Carl Phillips. Reprinted with permission from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
I think of this as a poem about intimacy and its secrets. There’s the opening suggestion that some things should perhaps be hidden. The poem ends with a speaker not sharing a feeling of incoming disaster—pretending to have heard nothing. Is that intimacy? Isn’t it?”
—Carl Phillips
