Variations on a Text by Donald Justice
I will die in Brooklyn, in January,
as snowflakes swarm the streetlamps
and whiten the cornices
of the sleeping brownstones.
It will be a Sunday like today
because, just now,
when I looked up, it seemed
that no one had ever
remembered or imagined
a thing so beautiful and lonely
as the pale blue city.
No one will stare up
at a light in the window
where I write this,
as taxis drag their chains
over the pavement,
as hulking garbage trucks
sling salt into the gutters.
Patrick Phillips is dead.
In January, in Brooklyn,
crowds of people stood
on subway platforms
watching snow
fall through the earth.
yellow traffic lights
blinked on and off,
and only the old man
pushing a grocery cart
piled high with empty cans
stopped long enough
to raise his paper bag,
then took a swig, out of respect,
as a Cadillac turned slowly
in the slush, and slowly
made its way down Fulton.
PATRICK PHILLIPS is the author of three poetry collections, Elegy for a Broken Machine(Knopf, 2015); Boy (Georgia, 2008); and Chattahoochee (Arkansas, 2004), which won the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has also translated When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt (Open Letter, 2013). His honors include both Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright at the University of Copenhagen, a Pushcart Prize, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Discovery / The Nation Prize from the 92nd Street Y. His poems appear in magazines such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and The Nation, and have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s radio show “The Writer’s Almanac.” He grew up in the foothills of North Georgia, and now lives in Brooklyn and is Associate Professor of English at Drew University. “Barbershop” appears in Elegy for a Broken Machine (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).
