73. The Slowness of Fields

a. in the manner of the first place

Of the fields in rows of vines
And what green grows on them

In the sun that goes for miles
And what moves under it

A sign of summer
Maybe warmth, warmnth, warmnths

What grows is green or greening
And a movement slower than sleep

What isn’t surrounded by water
Is covered with sky


b. following the pattern of the second place

You recognize in the dark the color green
As the absence of color, as the presence

Of night, against which all other colors
Are matched and must fail, incapable

Of attending to as much of the earth,
And yet ascendant, because they break

That blanket of green that covers
Everything we have not already covered

With the temporary shells of our world,
Roads, buildings, walkways, canopies of light.


c. in place of the requirement of the third place

Out from out of inside the leafy bodies of the maples
Come all these little birds, all these little brown birds,

Or grey and flying like leaves, as if they were the leaves
Of the tree falling, or flying, with their leafy wings,

Their wings made into layers of brown or grey leaves,
For these small brown-grey nameless birds

Which might be sparrows or wrens or finches or
Something else, but I don’t know the names of birds

Anymore, only the names of the nameless leaves that
Fall from these trees and fly back up into them.


d. where we might find the fourth place

The sun goes down on the island as the sun goes down,
Slowly at first, and then all of a sudden, so that we

Are buried in night deep enough that we realize
There is no night because everything is night

And day is simply an accidental turning of the earth
Towards sunlight, a temporary action forbidding reality,

Because we live in a dark world, and only the occasional
Bit of sunlight allows us the favor of color, or the delicate

Shapes of the pieces of the world, such as those flowers,
In so many colors, growing out of a continuous bed of green.


e. recognizing that there must be a fifth place to end it all

So, here, the world is flat, and the fields grow
Flat and green across the scanning gaze of your

Eyesight, and the fields grow slowly, so that
You do not notice they are growing until

They have grown entirely around you, and you
Are growing in green, and green and growing,

Slowly growing, as a field grows, around everyone
You know, until all that remains of you is a green

Streak across the leg of a pair of pants, and the green
Seems to grow bigger each day as if it remembers the field.