Pale Colors in a Tall Field Carl Phillips Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I’m thinking more how there’s a kind of violence to re-entering unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got torn away from so long ago it’s more than half forgotten, not that some things aren’t maybe best forgotten, at a certain point at least, I’ve reached that point in my own life where there’s so much I’d rather not remember, that to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough, some days, that there’s memory at all, though that’s not exactly it, it’s more what gets remembered, how we don’t get to choose. For example, if love used to mean rescue, now it’s more gladiatorial, though in the end more clean: Who said that? Not the one whose face I’ve described somewhere as the sun at that moment when, as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night’s shadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No. Not that one. And not the one whose specialty was making a bad habit sound more excusable by calling it ritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for it hard enough, you can always find some deeper form of sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—mere sorrow lay … I’d been arguing the difference between the soul being cast out and the soul departing, so I still believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.