death of the sibyl
TRANSCRIPT
Death of the SibylAuthor(s): Carl PhillipsSource: Callaloo, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), p. 440Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931643 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 18:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCallaloo.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 18:13:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
DEATH OF THE SIBYL
The world, when it comes, is not the fist and palm of a lover's roulette, nothing to brace for. There are no visions.
The blue stops here, as the walls do, light spills with the candor of money or jangled music on the morning's disorder:
the knife, streaked and at rest, spent fruit, plates round and flat as an old, unquestioned routine. Outside, the hours
drift and pick at the air, as if coming and going were grave decisions, as if there were still an immediacy, somewhere, to
things as they are. You know better. Your body isn't the restive field it was, clouds share none of the marbled indifference
of statues, whose absent limbs and dark-socketed heads once triggered desire. Surely this is the backside of God, to lie down
in a room of no accidents, touch your own flesh or not, to nobody's direction, grip sheets in your mouth and know passion is
little more than a wound to be straddled, shadow something less than pearls in retreat. To feel empty as seed to fire,
hear the rush of whole lives passing elsewhere, without you, and still believe you have not been entirely abandoned.
Callaloo 14.2 (1991) 440
This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 18:13:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions