Close Reading of a Favorite Poem by Carl Phillips

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“gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld—almost always
correctly”
—Carl Phillips, from “Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm”

At this point in the poem, the lines get shorter,
more clipped and economical. The diction
is gilt with artifice: the syntax order,
inverted as in yellowed tomes of fiction
and verse (“assignèd here,” then “here withheld”),
creates a quaint chiasmus. This is how
kings speak: the bird-boned monarch who bespelled
the young girl in the film we watched just now,
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, might talk this way
(rolling a poisoned peach inside his palm),
mightn’t he? Except that he would never say
that “gift is random,” or that chance is “almost
always correct”: he’d hold that free will matters—
your choice of words decides who’s saved, who shatters.