American Life in Poetry
It would be nice if we could all get one last ride through a part of our lives we’d left behind. Patrick Phillips, who lives in Brooklyn, is our guide and pilot in this fine poem.
Elegy with Oil in the Bilge
By the time we got out on the water
the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water
but a field of gray snow that we plowed
in one endless white furrow of water
as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers
and abandoned old jetties just under the water,
while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever,
whispering back to whatever the water
chattered and hissed through the hull—
until at last there were lights on the water
and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter
its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water
as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life,
through that beloved, indifferent harbor.