Civilization

There's an art
to everything. How
  the rain means
  April and an ongoingness like
  that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old
  set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
  processing...You're the same
  wilderness you've always

been, slashing through briars,
  the bracken
of your invasive
  self. So he said,
  in a dream. But

the rest of it—all the rest—
  was waking: more often
than not, to the next
  extravagance. Two blackamoor
  statues, each mirroring

the other, each hoisting
  forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
  peacock feathers. Don't
  you know it, don't you know

I love you, he said. He was
  shaking. He said:
I love you. There's an art
  to everything. What I've
  done with this life,

what I'd meant not to do,
  or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
  no regrets. Not the broken but
  still-flowering dogwood. Not

the honey locust, either. Not even
  the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
  every shadow is memory,
  memory...As he said to me

once, That's all garbage
  down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
  because addicted—do:
  resigned all over again. It

only looked, it—
  It must only look
like leaving. There's an art
  to everything. Even
  turning away. How

eventually even hunger
  can become a space
to live in. How they made
  out of shamelessness something
  beautiful, for as long as they could.

Carl Philips