Coin of the Realm
Phillips, Carl
Wrecked tiaras; plundered tombs ago-Beauty
was form, and form was discipline when, at last,
it forgets itself. Glamour and scandal weren’t yet
the same. Devotion was what it mostly still is:
a force. A willed exception. Some wore armor-
and to those who wore it others knelt, making of
the body and its gestures a complicated,
though very efficient braid of courtesy and
debasement-against all of which, no voice
from either party is said to have cried out, ever:
in fact, they worked together, so well, it made
labor seem a music, almost, in the way
the fluttering of a tattered flag-the sound
of that-and that of a whole one also fluttering
make a kind of music, though a music born
of accident, which they had long since stopped
trying to distinguish from fixed circumstance,
which is to say fate-their version of it-
which they did believe in. They believed in the gods,
and it is true the gods lived, for a time,
among them. Less credible: that the gods,
when they retreated, did so because convinced
no one prayed anymore, or not enough.
Or not to them. They simply left. In the wake
of which, the citizens continued turning wilderness
into settlement. Inscribing, as had been the custom,
each new building with that motto in which,
if anywhere, they seem clearly to have intended
to announce a sensibility they either thought
most defined them, or they hoped it would seem to:
Trust Me, As I Trust You-Meaning what, though?
That they were naive? unexacting? shrewd?
Each possibility is a real one,
as the difference it makes is real, when it comes
to determining not what manner of end they came to-
that part is legend-but to what degree, having found
you must, you must call it something, you will call it
inevitable. Deserved, even. Maybe worth what it cost.
Copyright New England Review 2004
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