Every City Is a Field

When the morning is about to begin, the sky still bruised by night,there is an instant when I can hear the wind outside,

moving across the field, the sound curving upward,& that’s when I see the field before the houses were there.

But the field looks the same: medusahead bent flat,sagebrush cured in heat—maybe this is the field after the houses,

reaching through time without difference. If I am never awakewhen I see the field, it has to mean something: why am I never

standing in it; why is the morning overcast so that I cannot seethe sky & thus have to imagine its black & blue night;

why can I hear the wind but not feel its chill. Wet leaves & tumbleweedsclot in the corner of the field but then the field is gone.

The field is a city where reflected in each windowis a city of windows, in each street a city of streets, in each person

a city where they are not alone on the sidewalk counting their steps.There is a narrative where the city never becomes the field,

but that narrative confuses what it means to be a city,what it means to be a field, & forgets that they mean the same thing,

only the content is changed—field of concrete, city of grass,one diminishing the other the way stones drink a lake away with each wave,

the water fossilized without the memory of being water:this is the moment in the narrative when every city becomes a field,

the moment when streetlamps light a length of freewayat the height of night & nothing speaks

because everything is empty, because the soul is neither city nor field& can never stand in one without standing in the other.