Tyree Daye's "On Finding a Field"

Thoughts on fields and grief.

On Finding a Field

I’ve been looking for you so long
I need you so  so
soso so     much    &
it snowed my woes
check my shoes my purple hands
I’ve been looking for you &
Can I plant my heart somewhere
in your mud? May I lay down awhile
under the magnolia in your middle?
Can I dig you up?

I’ve carried these grandmothers
and uncles for 28 years    my skin
wrapped stones   in my turning-over head

&
I need to put them down

from Cardinal (Copper Canyon, 2020)

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There’s a sentence by John Berger that I can’t help but think of when I read this poem. It’s the final sentence of his essay, “Field.” It reads:

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.

It’s a short essay, logical and beautiful — an attempt by Berger to describe the kind of “event” that occurs when one gazes upon a field and a “moment of disinterested observation” becomes a moment of “happiness,” when the world of the field and the world of the observer merge into something melded and gorgeous, beyond the bounds of seemingly logical description.

And it’s that final sentence, standing alone in its own paragraph, that describes that feeling so well. Because it’s an indescribable feeling, what Berger’s after — it’s one of those moments in life when what happens has no name. Because what name can describe light at work upon an open field? And what name can describe how it feels to see such light when one carries whatever one carries? When it’s a Monday, or a Tuesday, or a Sunday in late summer, and loneliness or sorrow or grief is just the first name for what you feel, but certainly not the last?

I carry those questions into the first lines of today’s poem by Tyree Daye:

I’ve been looking for you so long
I need you so  so
soso so     much

Just as Berger attempts to describe the ineffable, Daye does the same. And what I love about this poem is the way that Daye attempts to describe the longing inherent in finding something you’ve been needing for so long:

I need you so  so
soso so     much

This is one of those things that a poem can do, among many. Yes, sometimes there is the work of trying to find that single word that aptly names an emotion. But sometimes there is the way the simplicity of language itself — like the word “so” used as an adverb — can be made into something poetic. Sometimes there is no other way to describe something than through repetition and space. And I love the way Daye uses that word so in these lines. I love the inherent humanity. The urgency. The passion. The way it is doubled up and spaced out. I love the way, once it is written and read, that I cannot imagine it written any other way.

Daye’s poetry has always moved me for its approach to language, which is at once sensual and visceral and so expressly imaginative in the way it shapes the world it attempts to describe. For example, in his poem “Tongues,” Daye writes:

Before we knew what our bodies were worth

we made wounds the way the sky made blue.

I could talk about these lines all day. The wistful sound of each w, the extended, dancing rhyme from knew to wounds to blue. And the heartache and nostalgia at the heart of it all, the way such a description captures the ease of inflicted pain and the long history of such pain, and the way it undoes the carefree nature of an image — a blue sky — and links it to a lineage of wounds. It’s something remarkable, this kind of writing.

Today’s poem is no different. Describing the nature of carrying generational trauma — the heavy, intimate weight of this country’s history — Daye writes with an approach to language that fills the mouth at the same time as it surprises. Consider the lines the follow the first three:

it snowed my woes
check my shoes my purple hands
I’ve been looking for you &
Can I plant my heart somewhere
in your mud? May I lay down awhile
under the magnolia in your middle?
Can I dig you up?

Perhaps I’m reaching here, but the visual rhyme of woes and shoes — two words which don’t rhyme sonically — feels like its own couched critique. As a reader, you expect those words to rhyme as you read the poem aloud to yourself. I certainly did. The first time I read this poem, I pronounced shoes the same way as woes, only to correct myself. That tripping of the tongue, that slight twist, that failed expectation — it feels intentional, a way of enacting the failures of history, the lineage of trauma, the way, sometimes, a narrative is tripped-up at its heart, promising one thing and delivering another. Instead of the obvious rhyme of woes and shoes, there is the less obvious rhyme of shoes and you, of hands and plant. The music is still there. It ripples underneath the surface. This poem sings, but it reminds you, as it sings, of the many ways a song can be sung. Yes. Take a second and read these lines aloud and feel how lovely they roll off the tongue and move the mouth:

May I lay down awhile
under the magnolia in your middle?

Gorgeous, right? Magnolia in your middle. It’s music. But there is weight in this music, and Daye sets it apart, gives it its own stanza:

I’ve carried these grandmothers
and uncles for 28 years    my skin
wrapped stones   in my turning-over head

At the heart of so much of Daye’s poetry that I’ve read is this generational grief. It’s there in these lines and questions from his poem, “Inheritance”:

What will happen to her body

left in the ground, to the bodies in the street,

the uncles turned to ash on the fireplace mantles

the cousins we've misplaced?

How many people make up this wound?

Such questions are alive in today’s poem. They are the questions that come from the grief that have turned into “stones” in the speaker’s “turning-over head.” They are the things carried that need to be put down, that need to be given their own space in their own field, one without a memory or link to trauma — one free from pain.

I can’t stop thinking of Daye’s description of grief — “my skin / wrapped stones in my turning-over head” — because it feels like one of the most powerfully rendered descriptions of such a feeling that I’ve ever read. It does so much work at once. It turns memories — these vivid, seemingly blood-warm things — into stones. And it turns the body into an almost unconscious machine, like a plow that works over the barren field of itself over and over again, making what should be light and invisible and soulful — a memory of a body once alive — full of weight and hard to carry. I’m reminded of something I just read in Barry Lopez’s Horizon, where he describes being corrected by a geologist about the distinction between a stone and a rock:

A stone was a rock that had been put to some utilitarian or cultural use by a human being. Thus a headstone, a paving stone, a cornerstone, and Stonehenge. A rock was something that had not been handled by a human being.

This clarification makes Daye’s description even more sorrowful. It means that grief — the act of turning memories of life into stones we must continue to carry — is something we do to ourselves. It means that grief is human, an ordinary act of extraordinary difficulty that we live with each day. I don’t know what to make of this other than to feel a massive wellspring of sorrow for our collective existence — not necessarily for the fact that we each carry grief, but more so for the fact that we manufacture so many possibilities for it to occur. That each day, we compound the factors that allow for grief to continue — that this country fails to reckon with the scope of its racist and colonialist history, that people in power fail to acknowledge and address the rapidly increasing threat of global warming, and so on and so on — and, in doing so, force more and more people to make more and more stones of grief out of the lives they have lost. This realization, too, is a kind of grief. It manufactures a massive stone. And if you recognize this ongoing, constant loss, you carry that stone. You carry it everyday. What grief, that we allow this grief to continue.

I’m thinking again of that sentence by John Berger:

The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.

There is a way that this sentence, which seems at first to be primarily individualistic in scope, is actually something radically communal, empathetic, and beautiful. If Berger is saying that, for moments to become transcendent and resplendent with light, they must take on the shape and contour of our own individual lives, then it is also possible to extend such a possibility not just to ourselves, but to everyone. By that I mean, it is possible to say: everybody has a light-filled field that matches the needs of light in their lives. And, if that is true, then it is possible to say: everybody is looking for light that matches the contours of their life, the shape of the window in the house of the body where they live. Everybody deserves a field that they can look at, full of wonder, and feel free. To acknowledge this is to move one step closer to living in a world where we can look at the same field together and be moved together.

Such love and acknowledgement is seen in another poem with a field at its heart — Yehuda Amichai’s “Wildpeace,” which ends with the following lines:

Let it come

like wildflowers,

suddenly, because the field

must have it: wildpeace.

I am moved, in considering these poems, by the way poetry offers me generosity — the chance to witness testimony turned into song. And testimony of so much. Testimony of love. Testimony of grief. Testimony of pain, trauma, history. Testimony of joy. Testimony of what we do to one another, and what we bear, and how we move through the day. I don’t think I call this hope. I just call it witness. Or attention.

I think again of Barry Lopez — whose work has been a balm and inspiration for me lately. At the end of one chapter of Horizon, he writes about being a member of an archaeological dig, among people searching for those first humans. The chapter closes with this one moment:

With his fingers on the cranium of an australopithecine skull not much larger than a grapefruit, on the forward part of the vault where one day frontal lobes would rise up in Homo, he says, “Barry, I can’t prove this, but I believe we sang before we spoke.”

If that is true, then — sentimentality aside, or not, as I might argue this world could use more earnest sentiment — it says something about poetry. I think it says something, too, about feeling. That maybe our feelings are ancient things, felt and carried and shared and felt again by people alive in that past beyond the past. And that maybe, then, to sing our response to feeling is an ancient thing, as well. To sing our love. To sing our sorrow, our grief. That we are bound together by this song, rather than separated. What does it take to recognize that bond?