Rock Harbor bridges the gulf between conversation and the poem as sculpture. Each stanza has been painstakingly burnished to present a tonal range that can authentically capture "two bodies,/fucking" and the elegance of "in dream,/to know a thing is to/have a gift and/not to," within a few lines. In Phillips's spectrum, all lines are blurred, but the body stands with the same stark beauty and autonomy as the word that describes it.
           As in The Tether, he explores love and its monolithic uncertainties, using them as a lens through which to show the world. Judith Kitchen deems him the master of "ineffable hesitations" in relationships. Here, he delves even deeper into those wild spaces, with greater wisdom and abandon. The erotic flourishes, as always, with unflinching candor, but acts as a springboard to the inner world. As Phillips commented in a 2000 interview, "the body [is] a touchstone by which we can come to understand the longings, hungers, desires that are all deemed higher."
           While these poems have definitely been worked to a unique brilliance, they also resonate with a sense of literary heritage. Like Oppen, Phillips captures an artistic quality through short lines. Unexpected breaks slow the reader's focus, creating a meditative pace where white space bustles with projected meanings. Hints of myth gleam through the modern diction, yielding the skeletal mood of a minotaur or monarch to the speaker's questioning. To call the love-themed pieces aubades would be to sentimentalize them. However, many of them grow out of the misty space between passion and knowledge of its loss, and dig for a fiercer poignance through deep questioning.
           In Rock Harbor, the bed appears as a nexus between love and the dream world, a crucible yielding insight and fleeting heat. "As a Blow, from the West" depicts its transience most movingly, opening with a lyrical invitation:

Names for the moon:
Harvest; and Blue; and
Don't Touch Me–

and Do.

A dream of a volcano functions as the central metaphor, around which flowers and native cultures flourish. Knowing the cycles of the larger world, chiefly love's tendency to end painfully, the speaker and his other drive forward, through a sometimes painful choreography, bound "like so many/birds that, given the chance/not to fly for once in/formation, won't take it, or/cannot. . .." This compulsion is tempered by the speaker's ability to capture, in word and memory, what's transpired, extracting insight if not the ineffable core. The dream fades quickly, leaving afterimage and the shock of its abandonment:

. . . isn't it only in
the bracing and first wake of
loss that we guess most cleanly
the speed with which what held us
left us?

The other emerges as a triumph of the body, devoted to the world that words never capture. If the poem raises one central question, it might be why, as rational beings, lovers pursue their dream state, when loss returns with tidal inevitability:

Until to leave, or
try to–and have drowned

trying–becomes refrain,
the one answer each time
to whatever question:

what was the place called?
what was the house like?

what was it we did inside it?

In time, memories fade, leaving only insight and verbal monuments. The speaker's desperation cools to wisdom, permanent and destined to be submerged under new experience.
           "Minotaur" captures the classic moment of aubade, with the landscape stirring in sunrise, the animal and civilized domains, fused in sex as they are in the mythical beast, dissolving their bond.

we resemble hardly
ever those birds now, noising but
not showing from their double
cloisters–
leaves,
fog.

I miss them.

The dog's clamor to escape is beautifully likened to "a dream of the body caught/shining inside a struggling whose end it cannot know will be/no good one." Likewise, a burrow strays through a flowerbed, passing tomatoes, which yield names, as the moon did before, restoring the speaker's Adamic role, distinct from nature, a steward and not an acolyte. The sleeping lover has lost inscrutability, displaying his inner world through the face, the two territories aligning for a crystalline instant.

I have held faces lovelier–lovelier, or
as fair.
            They make sense
eventually. Your own begins to:

fervor of a man
cornered; unuseful tenderness with which,

to the wound it won't survive, the animal
puts its tongue.

          The collection explores many more themes than romantic love, the evolution of relationships and the inner tension between levels of being, capturing landscape, chapel, and the shifting architecture of the self between. Through varying strains of rumination, lyric, and conversation at every register, a central conflict rises, pitting the ineffable against the solidly objective. While drawing lasting insight from both, Phillips doesn't laminate them, or bind his poems to pat symbolism. In "Halo," his admonition to the other rings true with the reader as well:

There is little I've not done for you.
There are questions.
There are answers I do not give.

Through this cosmic reserve, less the product of reticence than baptism in suffering, shines an empathy in which he and the other are linked in their possession of indefinable worlds, that can't be explicated, but only sensed, like the shadow of loss and every radiance that precedes it:

          Here I am, I say,
wanting to help,
Over here. And you turn. And

on its axis–swift,
inexorable as luck–the dream, turning,
with you. . .