The Field
Hours repeat their work.
They bleach the evil blooms.
They dust the field in tinder.
If there is a wind
tithing through the corn again,
they make it spirit,
measuring the seasonal reenactment
of how we got here
against the constant wheat.
Like distant trains,
the stars help us move closer
to what tiny faith
lurks within our breathing.
Sitting on the porch,
I’ll believe anything.
That we are better than we are.
That we might find better ways
to want to be.
All winter, this land
becomes a gradual process
that howls in the body.
A frosted, open heart
deadly close to sleeping.
And I want to be finished
with all this terrible history.
To find another skin
in the wild affirmation;
a new tongue
between the missing
and those poor children
who will run from me.
The moon makes a poor decision.
Witches switch to digital
to better measure
its crumpled, plastic gleam.
“Merry Christmas, witches,”
moan the snowy owls,
and though it isn’t Christmas,
they will be right
some day, eventually.
from The Father of the Arrow is the Thought (Octopus Books, 2015)
I don’t just want to write about this poem because it mentions Christmas! Or winter! Or any of that! Okay? I don’t! I do not! I just love this poem. And I love the book this poem is from: The Father of the Arrow is the Thought. It’s a journey of a book: meditative, tangential, wide-ranging, self-deprecating, light-filled, dark-filled, a book of longing, a book of looking, a book of measuring the distance between us — humans — and the world — everything (so much) else.
I hesitate to say kinds of poems, but today’s poem is an example of one of my favorite kinds of poems. By that I mean, not quite narrative, not quite lyric. Something in between. Maybe: blueprint of the mind in a moment. Maybe: let me tell you about — wait, look, there’s a cloud. Maybe: we live in the present tense. Maybe: we encounter so much else. Today’s poem is a permissive poem, a tangential one. It is a poem of deep allowance — it allows itself to move from one detail to the next, one image to a feeling, one feeling to a hope, one hope to a sorrow, and back, and forth, and back again.
What I love about today’s poem is its pull: gentle, unassuming. Notice how it begins:
The hours repeat their work.
Already, the poem exists in a kind of giving-over-ness. The hours repeat themselves. They “bleach.” They “dust.” And here comes the wind again. It is a poem born out of an almost-nothing. I think of the opening lines of Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole”:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
And yet, in DeWeese’s poem today, there is perhaps a greater distance between the speaker and the field. Or maybe not. Maybe there is an attempt at solidarity. But either way, there are the hours, and the work they do on us, as people, and all we interact with. And when I mention the gentle pull of this poem, what I mean is this: there is a line, a moment, when this poem begins to usher the reader into a kind of transcendence. It is when DeWeese writes “they make it spirit,” referring to the way the hours take hold of the wind, make of it a kind of eternity.
That notion of the spirit pushes the poem toward the sublime: where mystery meets reality, that line so big and so wide and so boundary-less that it stops being a line and becomes a space, a place your mind can live within and barely comprehend itself. It is from such a place that DeWeese offers up my favorite moment of this poem:
Like distant trains,
the stars help us move closer
to what tiny faith
lurks within our breathing.
Sitting on the porch,
I’ll believe anything.
That we are better than we are.
That we might find better ways
to want to be.
How beautiful is that? I think often that moments such as these reaffirm why I believe in the capability of poetry as a medium. On their own, these lines would be beautiful. They are a testament to faith, and hope, and belief, and the sorrow of wanting something that feels forever, or almost always, out of reach. And yet, it is how I encounter these lines that also moves me. It is how the lines preceding these lines introduce me to an idea, a notion, a sense of the sublime. They butter me up for beauty. They are the almost-meandering, nearly-exact enactment of a voice beside me at a table, talking about the nothing that they see — which is a kind of everything — before bearing witness to the human condition. If I wasn’t listening, I just might miss it.
Why can’t a poem be approached like that, almost as a conversation that can tip between mystery and reality at any moment? I think of Diane Wakoski, whose poem “Blue Monday” flirts with anecdotes and lyrics and details before landing on this stanza:
So blue trains rush by in my sleep.
Blue herons fly overhead.
Blue paint cracks in my
arteries and sends titanium
floating into my bones.
Blue liquid pours down
my poisoned throat and blue veins
rip open my breast. Blue daggers tip
and are juggled on my palms.
Blue death lives in my fingernails.
This is a kind of poem that shows you — as does DeWeese’s poem today — what poetry can do. It can shift between one mode of speech and another, one moment and another, one mood and another. Why? Because you can. And I. Because poetry so often enacts our own potentials and our own capacities — not just for beauty, but for complexity, and contradiction. Poetry is a limitless as we allow ourselves to be.
I think, too, of Chen Chen’s poem “Winter” — a personal favorite. It moves so abruptly between image and detail and question, between the smelly, fragrancy specifics of pooping and what it means to love one’s self, or another. In doing so, it opens itself — and us, the reader — into new, wider possibilities. Like the best testimony, it turns me inside out. I mean, read the final lines:
I mean, is “shit” more or less literary than “poop”?
I mean, one winter night I got sick & pooped the bed.
& he just got up with me.
Helped strip the sheets, carry it all to the washer.
I kept saying, I’m so sorry, shivering, I’m so, I’m sorry. But he said, What? Hey. I love you.
I guess what I am trying to say is that DeWeese’s poem today makes me think of the absolute beauty of the human mind. It is a mind that hopes, that looks at the stars and sees “what tiny faith / lurks within our breathing.” It is a mind that despairs, that wants “to be finished / with all this terrible history.” It is a mind that lets itself have no answers. And what a beautiful thing, to have no answers. To often, what is offered as an answer is a kind of perpetration of wrongness.
But then, from that despair, from all that longing, DeWeese’s mind is a mind that also humors. I love the quick turn offered by the line: “The moon makes a poor decision.” It’s so utterly human, to move from this inwardness to a kind of blaming outward-ness. Just as the poem pulls you into its own interiority, it lets you free from it again. It metaphors the world. It lets owls speak.
That kind of placement of the speaker in the awesome-hugeness of the world is something I love about DeWeese’s work, which so often moves abruptly in scale, in ways that both shatter me and make me laugh. In his poem, “The Yard,” he begins:
The star kept getting closer.
The radio tower aimed its red light
straight at the star,
the one star in our city
that was definitely moving,
burning up the hot sky.
If it landed on my face
and I got cancer,
what would that be better than?
Maybe this isn’t supposed to be funny, but it is. Because what would be better than being smacked in the face by a literal star? And yet, immediately after this, DeWeese writes:
I have been arranging a strange life
in the expectation of this
or some other, more local disaster.
And then I realize —immediately — that I too have been doing the same. I’ve been arranging my life according to expectation, have been moving between one assumption of disaster and the next, every waking minute. The beauty of poetry is that it can throw such assumptions up against one another, can throw delight against sorrow, nature against humanity, beauty against violence — and then see what comes of it: what energy, what further sorrow, what generous hope. Language is not just what we think. It can also be how we think. And if it is now how we think, it can remind us of how to think. Or point us toward such a direction.
In another poem, “The Pasture,” DeWeese teases out an allusion to James Wright, and writes:
To Whom it May Concern:
I have wasted your life
and the lives of many things
to deliver you this body,
to leave you with this spreadsheet
of personal experience
multiplied by the imagination.
The honesty of such lines kills me. I, too, have wasted some or most of my life, have wasted entire days and have felt myself wasted, too. I don’t know what to make of it. But I do know that “personal experience / multiplied by the imagination” is a kind of definition of poetry. And I know that each singular personal experience is a thing so full of its own suffering and its own witnessing and its own acts of living. And if the imagination is as beautiful and capable as some say it is — and it must be, it must certainly be — then it is hard to imagine anything more wonderful than so many people in this world both living and imagining, all at once.
I mentioned the sublime earlier. I have been trying, more and more, to live within the sublime, to give myself over to mystery, to not see in the wide expanse of everything something that might be discovered, or figured out, or answered. I think the sublime is where, as DeWeese writes, “we might find better ways / to want to be.” And maybe others have their own definition of the sublime, but for me, it occurs when I come to a realization that I can only be as big as I am. Which means that I am always as small as I am. Which means that the ways I want to be do not have to be things that take up space, but rather offer it, or give it back. To recognize one’s smallness is to recognize one’s capacity for grace. And grace, I think, is a kind of personal experience multiplied by the imagination. It is, or can be, limitless. A wild and beautiful affirmation of the ways the things we are capable of do not have to be things that make of this world a kind of absence. They can make this world whole. Or closer to it.
This newsletter found me a bit lost on a fantastically dark and wet Sunday afternoon. Amid a Scottish winter whose darkness seems to only have grown more powerful this year. Thank you for luring my mind away from that and towards your beautifully crafted thoughts on these poems. Now I have to hunt down Chen Chen's poem and "The Yard".