In French, “aubade” means “dawn serenade” and the word has also come to mean songs or poems for lovers parting in the morning. If a poet has an aubade in his or her collection, I often for some reason find myself gravitating towards it, as I was to this poem by Patrick Phillips (1970-) from his newest collection, Elegy for a Broken Machine. As I make my way through this book, I’m appreciating his meditations on the elegant and cruel mechanics of life, the broken machines that surround us and comprise us as human beings.
“Aubade”
It’s easy to pretend
that we don’t love
the world.
But then there is
your freckled skin. Then:
your back’s faint
lattice-work of bones.
I’m not saying this
makes up for suffering,
or trying to pretend
that each day’s little ladder
of sunlight, creeping
across the bed at dawn,
somehow redeems it
for the thousand ways
in which we’ll be forsaken.
Maybe, sweet sleeper,
breathing next to me
as I scratch and scrawl
these endless notes,
I’m not saying anything
but what the sparrows out
our window sing,
high in their rotten oak.
live in the layers 