☀ Today's Poem: "Somewhere It's Still Summer" Carl Phillips

Here's where they stopped to rest, presumably, this
easy-enough-to-miss depression in the low-cut grass. I like
to think they had a chance to sleep a bit, before
everything else, all the rest that followed, that they neither
deserved nor didn't,
the way I see it. I prefer a clean view—
always have—unencumbered by moral valence; if given
paper and told to draw morality, I'd draw a cloud
of meadowlarks when all at once, as if on some cue long ago
agreed upon,
they disassemble. If most people would draw
a different picture—or say it can't be drawn, morality,
being abstract, as if that meant shapeless (define shape)—
that doesn't make me wrong or miles ahead of everyone, it
means I'm not
someone else, a fact in which I take no little
pride, though I try to do so humbly, which is to say, in private,
I keep my best to myself; my worst
also. I think the truth
lies elsewhere. As with sex, or the weather, or betrayal,
would you rather be surprised, disturbed, bewitched,
or merely entertained, is maybe
one way of putting it. Another:
they were men who faltered in front of danger the way
most men do, who haven't had to live with it. The kind
of men who, having ridden bareback for the first time,
think they know what it
feels like, to be a centaur—
the horse's body, the man's
steep chest, all hybridity
and power, two powers
especially, lust and intellect, a combination that has
mostly worked, though we all make mistakes. Right? We
all do? I know a centaur
when I see one. These
were men, riding horses. Absolutely nothing mythological
about them.