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The Field
- Wesleyan University Press
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You sitting at your table looking at the postcard. Green day lights the windows; everyone still asleep. Taut lines. Day, with its hours, and buildings; people start, around you. You wait a minute more in the white room— white tent against the snowed-over path, the wind, familiar voice—one life— Every day you move farther outside the outlines, kinder, more dangerous. Where will you be going. Who will the others be. The Field “There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay. Bodies have been found which must have lain in bogs for more than a thousand years . . .”—A Danish Almanack of 1837. —P. V. Glob, The Bog People A sculpture in a bare white gallery: Pike jaws arch, in a shining transparent space without locality: levels of peat, sand, air. Bones. Teeth. Fine, thin white jaws: the willingness to do harm—Odysseus leaving— At forty we have always been parents; we hold each other’s sex in a new tenderness . . . As we were; hardly breathing over the pulse in the infant’s lucent temple— Our breath comes shorter, our lives have been a minute, a feather, our sex is chaff . . . 130 door in the mountain Sleep: the room breaks up into blue and red film, long muscles crossing bones, raw pelvis pulled to birth: Incised on stone, bronze, silver Eyes, belly, mouth Circle on circle— Look, by morning noises, in this city island flickering with gold flame, These photographs. The Tollund man. The Windeby girl. The goddess Nerthus. In the middle of a light wood of tall forked trees stripped white at the edge of a bog, in Denmark, we walk slowly out to the field walk slowly by the hacked-out cots of silk bog children. Living Together Dawn, streaks of rose-brown, dry— A car starts up. A needle veers, an hour, a summer . . . Day settles back, on the last century, our trying, our Biblical conviviality. This should, should not, happen, these two people met, or not then, not now; or now. Out in the white Judaic light you move like figures in a lesson; You open your life like a book. Still I hear your story the messenger 131 ...