Sunset Park by Patrick Phillips

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 19, 2015   Sunset Park   Patrick Phillips

The Chinese truck driver throws the rope like a lasso, with a practiced flick,   over the load: where it hovers an instant, then arcs like a willow   into the waiting, gloved hand of his brother.   What does it matter that, sitting in traffic, I glanced out the window   and found them that way? So lean and sleek-muscled in their sweat-stiffened t-shirts:   offloading the pallets just so they can load up again in the morning,   and so on, and so forth forever like that—   like Sisyphus I might tell them if I spoke Mandarin,   or had a Marlboro to offer, or thought for a minute they’d believe it   when I say that I know how it feels to break your own   back for a living. Then again, what’s the difference?   When every light for a mile turns green all at once,   no matter how much I might like to keep watching   the older one squint and blow smoke through his nose?   Something like sadness, like joy, like a sudden love for my life,   and for the body in which I have lived it, overtaking me all at once,   as a bus driver honks and the setting sun glints, so bright   off a windshield I wince and look back and it’s gone.            Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Phillips. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “The occasion of ‘Sunset Park’ could hardly be less poetic: it’s set during a traffic jam, as I stare out the window at two men loading a truck. I hope that what happens after that communicates not what I’ve figured out about the world—as we sometimes ask poems to do—but plain wonder and awe at being alive. I can’t say exactly what the poem is about, but if I had to try, I’d quote Flannery O’Connor: ‘the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.’” —Patrick Phillips   Patrick Phillips is the author of Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015). He teaches at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.   Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger Most Recent Book by Phillips   Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015) "Traffic" by Bill Berkson "Succession" by Jeffrey Brown "The Moment" by Marie Howe Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038