Detail of the Hayfield
I followed myself for a long while, deep into the field.
Two heads full of garbage.
Our scope was larger than I realized,
which only made me that much more responsible.
Yellow, yellow, gold, and ocher.
We stopped. We held the field. We stood very still.
Everyone needs a place.
You need it for the moment you need it, then you bless it—
thank you soup, thank you flashlight—
and move on. Who does this? No one.
Copyright © 2013 by Richard Siken. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
"My new manuscript includes several long 'landscape' poems that move forward with rhetorical and meditative gestures. I wanted to inhabit these locations in a personal way as well. It didn't work inside the poems—they became muddy and confusing, with conflated speakers and tones. The 'detail' poems offered a way to revisit the landscapes with an inside view, rather than the overview. 'Detail of the Hayfield' is a companion piece to a longer poem, 'Gold Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors.'"
—Richard Siken
Richard Siken
Richard Siken is the author of I Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); Blue Jupiters (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015); and Crush (Yale University Press, 2006), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 2004. He lives in Tucson.