Carl Phillips' "Archery": Things I Have Actually Liked About 2020, Part 3

A few days ago, my friend and colleague Jenny Molberg pointed out that the July/August issue of Poetry magazine has quite a few excellent poems (also excellent, btw, is Molberg’s new poetry collection Refusal, which is one of the best things I’ve read in 2020—in fact, go read this poem now). Jenny specifically praised Rosebud Ben-Oni’s excellent “Poet Wrestling with Blood Falling Silent,” which is one of the first published poems I’ve read that deals with the Covid epidemic. There’s plenty of other good stuff in the issue as well, including a poem I particularly liked by Erika Meitner that uses the image of a gilded mammoth skeleton near the receding coastline of Miami as the centerpiece of a reflection on climate change and geological time.

The piece I keep coming back to, however, is a poem by Carl Phillips called “Archery”.[1] It is at least in part a love poem, and like so many love poems it is also (and perhaps “really”) about time. Like so many poems about time it is pulled gravitationally toward thinking about death, and like so many poems about death it considers one of the oldest impulses of lyric poetry, which is to imagine aesthetic perfection or permanence as an alternative to or end-run around mortality. That description, though, makes “Archery” sound like a rehash of a Renaissance sensibility, which it definitely is not—the speaker is too skeptical for that, too aware that a poem can’t be at the center of the universe any more than we can, even if a poem can be at the center of one or a few of our own little moments.  

The first stanza (of six) is the only one that actually talks about archery, most notably in this sentence: “To have timed your arrow/ perfectly meant watching the air for a moment/ seem stitched throughout with a kind of/ timelessness.” This jumps out for a few reasons, not the least being that it is surrounded by sentences that are filled with commas and parentheses. The sentence with the arrow, though, flies directly to its conclusion as it describes a breathtaking moment when some well-calculated action is performed “perfectly,” and thus seems to freeze time.[2] Then the next line mentions a lover, which implicitly brings into the poem the idea of cupid’s arrow (another version of breath taken, time frozen). And so the idea of momentary perfection is introduced, and will eventually be echoed near the end of the poem.

But the center of the poem is far more vexed. In the second stanza time becomes murky, as a new lover mumbles in half-sleep things you would expect to hear from an old lover. Phillips echoes this murkiness in a shift from past tense (“meant”) to present continuous (“he’s mumbling”) even though we are (I think) in the same scene with the same two people in those sentences. Then, the third and fourth stanzas widen to a more panoramic scope:

     All those hours spent trying to outstare the distance

of what the days must come to,

and pretending a choice to it: now the shadow-script

that willows and hazel trees mark the barn’s western

face with; now the wind-rippled field, like a lesser version—tamer,

tameable—of the sea, for movement (same infinite

pattern, and variation; randomness and intention; release;

restraint—that kind of movement) ...

If Phillips stopped at the colon (after “choice to it”), this would still be incredible stuff. Those three lines powerfully evoke the effort it takes to ignore how little control we have over the end-points of our lives’ trajectories. But the next five lines are the heart of the poem. They give concrete imagery to Phillips’ decidedly metaphysical concerns, yet they resist becoming some symbol that lets us pin down the poem. One way to read everything after the colon is that the two clauses beginning with “now” are the options in the choice we pretend to have—specifically, a choice between shadows on a barn or ripples in a field, which is arguably no choice at all. But perhaps there is some solace that the choice we pretend is between two beautiful things, and arguably even two meaningful things (one is “shadow-script,” the other might have “intention”), though again, that meaning might be something we project. Does nature signify, or do we see what we want? Phillips doesn’t posit an answer so much as he makes us experience the question, in lines that catch and sway like the oceanic field he describes.

There is, though, another way to read those two “now” clauses—not  that they are options (“on the one hand this, on the other that”), but that they are two points in a temporal sequence (“now it is this, and now it is that”). In this reading, the speaker is elaborating not the choice we pretend, but the “distance” we try to “outstare.” And if these lines are about trajectory across a distance (as so much of the poem has been), the trajectory leads from something relatively human-scaled—the barn and the trees—and out into the field that moves in “infinite/ pattern, and variation.”[3] The field is more “tameable” than the sea, but at the extreme edges of our vision, it becomes pure motion, an abstract suggestion of nature’s grandeur, or even just the grandeur of physics.

In any event, the poem pulls back to shorter, tighter phrasing after this. Phillips is loose with grammar throughout the poem—there are more fragments in it than complete sentences—but that is especially true in the last two stanzas, where the clipped statements read as the speaker trying to get things under control after the sweep of the fourth stanza. This is apparent in the statement “To sing a song/ of water, and not drown in it,” which perhaps nods to the way that the poem itself sunk into abstraction right after it mentioned the sea.

But if you can sing of the sea and not drown, you’re onto something: “Some calling that/ a good trick. And some calling it// mastery.” Phillips undermines the authority of the word “mastery” a bit by putting it right after a rather abrupt stanza break—certainly he’s setting the word apart to make us think about it. But these lines are also reminiscent of the lines about archery from the start of the poem. One “good trick” is a perfectly aimed arrow, and another is the trick of the artist able to dabble in danger, to think hard about darkness, but then execute an escape and not dwell there permanently.

The last three lines of the poem execute their own elegant escape, and they’re beautiful in a way that I’m reluctant to tread upon with some reading of what they’re “about,” though surely they’re about love, death, and a dream of renewal. I’m struck by the degree to which archery and the image of an arrow color my thinking all the way through the poem, even though Phillips only actually uses the word “arrow” once, in the very first line. Yet it is a powerfully resonant image across the text, able to call to mind love’s arrow, but also time’s arrow, and perhaps even the arrows of Artemis, goddess of the moon, “mute arbitress of tides.” Which is to say you can make archery represent time moving forward, or time cycling, as you see fit. But ultimately, Phillips uses the image of the archer to reflect upon the probably naive, possibly pyrrhic effort a poet makes to create a focused, time-pausing moment amidst the sway and muddle of life: the trick of propelling some piercing phrase along a perfect line.  

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[1] I suppose I should note, in the interest of full disclosure and humblebragging, that Phillips was one of my professors at Wash U twenty-plus years ago when I was a floppy-haired English major. He was an excellent teacher, but completely apart from that, his poems always floored me. Judging by his wikipedia page full of awards, I’m hardly alone in that judgment.

[2] The line breaks here are impressive, and impressively varied: ending on “arrow” propels; ending on “for a moment” urges a pause in tension with the enjambment; ending on “kind of” builds tension via interruption.

[3] There’s a comparison to be made here to Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” which also moves in a trajectory from the human-scale to something much larger. Indeed, one hesitation I have about my reading of these lines in “Archery” is that I worry I’m just superimposing Dickinson over Phillips.