Field
Field is pause field is plot field is red chigger bump where
the larvae feed corn wig curled in your ear. Field cares not
a fig for your resistance though kindly gently lay your
head down girl lay it down. When ready storm when
summer kilned smoothly as a cake. Awake! Awake and
wide is field. And viral. Biotic. Field of patience of percolation
and policy. Your human energy. Come again? What for? In
field there is no time at all no use a relief the effort done
which is thank you finally the very lack of you. Lay your
head down girl lay it down. In field which has waited since
you first ascended to the raw end of your squared off world and
gazed upon your subjects: congery of rat snake corn snake
of all the low ribbons bandaging the stalks. Progress in field
foot sliding in matter slick chaff in fall. And always field’s oboe
this sawing a wind that is drawing its nocturne through the 23rd
mansion of the moon. Field is Requiel’s music and the Wild Hunt
of offer. In field they are waiting you are sounding. Go home.
Copyright © 2013 by Erin Belieu. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2013. Browse the Poem-a-Day archive.
"'Field' is something I wrote right after teaching W. H. Auden's poem 'The Wanderer' and as I was just finishing reading Jane Austen's Persuasion again. I think the combination of these two put me into a useful state of melancholy, the kind of pleasant, autumnal tinge of morbidity that I find good for making poems."
—Erin Belieu