Here—

your shirt, he said,

after. Lifting it. Bringing it

to me as if it were
not a shirt
but a thing immaculate,

or in flames, or—
with a single sword
positioned through it—

a sacred heart.
Handling it
like a woman shown

handling laundry in a wind

between two wars while,
in the distance,

shadow-like,
migrants work the fields’
abundance,

drift—like wind,
like war—to the next
farm, the next,

as to a lover, as far into

fall as whenever the cold stops
the need to do so,

the way that truth when

it is brutal—though no less
beautiful for

being brutal
than for being true—can at first
stop everything except

an instinct
to get more close, take it:
gift, ransom—How turn away? How

not rush forward,

and fold it—in flames, immaculate—
in your arms?

—Carl Phillips, “Conduct”, The Rest of Love