Elegy for a Broken Machine

Now in paperback, this stunning collection of elegies--a finalist for the National Book Award--bears witness to the small beauties and inevitable losses of our transient life.

Elegy for a Broken Machine is a son's lament for his father. It takes us from the luminous world of childhood to the fluorescent glare of operating rooms and recovery wards, and into the twilight lives of those who must go on. In one poem Phillips watches his sons play "Mercy" just as he did with his brother: hands laced, the stronger pushing the other back until he grunts for mercy, "a game we played // so many times / I finally taught my sons, // not knowing what it was, / until too late, I'd done." Phillips documents the unsung joys of midlife, the betrayals of the human body, and his realization that as the crowd of ghosts grows, we take our places, next in line. The result is a twenty-first-century memento mori, fashioned not just from loss but also from praise, and a fierce love for the world in all its ruined splendor.

PATRICK PHILLIPS is the author of two previous poetry collections, Boy and Chattahoochee, a work of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, and is translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems by the Danish writer Henrik Nordbrandt. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Drew University.Elegy for a Broken Machine

My father was trying

to fix something

and I sat there just watching,

like I used to,

whenever something

went wrong.

I kept asking where he’d been,

until he put down a wrench

and said Listen:

dying’s just something

that happens sometimes.

Who knows

where that kind of dream comes from?

Why some things

vanish, and some

just keep going forever?

Like that look on his face

when he’d stare off at something

I could never make out

in the murky garage,

his ear pressed

to whatever it was

that had died—

his eyes listening for something

so deep inside it, I thought

even the silence,

if you listened,

meant something.

*****
Old Love

You, lovely beyond

all lovely, who

I’ve loved since I

first looked into

your blue

beyond blue eyes,

are no longer

anywhere on earth

the girl these words

call out to,

though never, since,

have I not been

a darkening wood

she walks through.

***** 

The Guitar

It came with those scratches

from all their belt buckles,

palm-dark with their sweat

like the stock of a gun:

an arc of pickmarks cut

clear through the lacquer

where all the players before me

once strummed—once

thumbed these same latches

where it sleeps in green velvet.

Once sang, as I sing, the old songs.

There’s no end, there’s no end

to this world, everlasting.

We crumble to dust in its arms.