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FIELD #80

(Spring 2009)
 
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Contents

 

FIELD 80: An Introduction

D. Nurkse

A Night in Martirios
Evora
The Long Struggle Against the Mind

Christopher Buckley
Science, Math, and the Music of the Spheres

Milan Djordjevic
Translated by Charles Simic

 

Spud
Silence and Snow
The Rain Wants to Kill Itself
Melissa Kwasny
The City of Many Lovers
Kevin Prufer
The Internet
Pre-Elegies
David Wagoner
Mother’s Night
Elizabeth Harrington
Pain
Down to the Coffee
Elton Glaser
Nostalgia as Prophecy
Thomas Lux

Ermine Noose
Lux
The Uninoculated,

Christopher Phelps
This Is Yours
Katie Hubbard
Cemetery
Günter Eich
Translated by Stuart Friebert
Theories of Art
Ivory
Punctuation Marks
Michele Glazer
Part of Which is Remembered and the Other Part is Not Forgotten
G. C. Waldrep
The Fortune-Teller, or Classical Rubric in Time of War
Betsy Sholl
Elephant Seals
Janice N. Harrington
Self-Portrait with Catfish
Tadeusz Rózewicz
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak
Homework Assignment on the Subject of Angels
Lilah Hegnauer
We Fucking Sang It
Cynthia Cruz
Junk Garden
Kingdom of Dirt
Wish Fulfillment
Anna Journey
Rose is Dead and Crashes the Party
Lia Purpura
Three Stillnesses
Ryan Walsh
The Lee Shore
Ray Amorosi
Stakes
Linen
Bruce Weigl
Elegy for Liam
The Deer Cave Drawing in Southern China that the Chinese Girl Drew on the Napkin to Show Me Exactly Where the Character Now Used for the Word Deer Came From
Caitlin Scott
Multicollinearity
Elisabeth Murawski
  Bond
David St. John
  from The Auroras
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
  Last Summer of Single-dom
Jane Downs
  Flight
Melissa C. Morris
  I Know Where the Color Went
B. K. Fisher
  Interruption by Archangel
Blue Nudes
Erin Batykefer
  See / Be Seen
Carl Phillips
  Continuous Until We Stop
Cathedral
Laura Kasischke
  Landscape With One of the Earthworm’s Ten Hearts
Kathleen Winter
  Morning Poem
Thomas Brasch
Translated by Anne Posten
  On the Twelfth Day It Seemed to Him as if the Waves
Sarah Vap
  Floating Turd Next to the Dead Floating Snake
Jeffrey Bean
  "Dawn-sick rose-sick word-sick worm-round"
"I have seen, Loud God, the crackle and smash of streams"
Mary Ann Samyn
  Oceanic
Something About Vulnerability
Franz Wright
  Night Flight Turbulence
Waltham Catholic Cemetery
To a Boston Poet
Eric Pankey
  My Brother’s Insomnia
Edge of Things
Distances
Frannie Lindsay
  Pulling off the Highway on the Way to a Deathbed to Visit a Workhorse at Rest
The Urn Garden
Wayne Miller
  The Last Visit
One Soldier
David Hernandez
  American Water
Amit Majmudar
  Evangelical Fugue
Hysserlik Ghazal
Jean Valentine
  Eurydice Who Guides
Emmanuel Moses
Translated by Marilyn Hacker
  First Elegy
Towards Buxtehude
Mister Nobody and the Theater
Sara Michas-Martin
  The Empty Museum
Kurt S. Olsson
  Kilimanjaro
Carol Moldaw
  Alert
Traci Brimhall
  Rookery
Heather Sellers
  Alyssa’s 7th Birthday Party, When Her Mother Returns to Town Maybe for Good
Green Man Untranslated
Jen McClanaghan
  Magician’s Assistant Sawed in Two
Henrietta Goodman
  Willful Blindness
Camille Norton
  Nature
The Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone
Alice Friman
  Alchemy
Dermatology
Timothy Liu
 

Currency
An Assignation

Greg Wrenn
  Monogamy
Mindfulness
Jennifer Atkinson
  Canticle of More Wishes
Canticle of the Night Path
Canticle of Stone
Dennis Schmitz
  Song of Myself
Talking into the Monster’s Hat
Charles Wright
  April Evening
No Direction Home
Music for Midsummer’s Eve

 
 
 

A NIGHT IN MARTIRIOS

Sometimes when the story is wildly implausible
the author will have one character say
I have a hard time believing this
and the other explains:
it’s the axle working loose,
the fog in the orchards,
controlled fires in the canebrake.


Now we are resting at twilight
on a frayed floral quilt
and the dimity curtains open
in the wind from Orizaba.

Now the author has the characters undress
and sleep together, they are naked
as the space between words,
the lamp is unlit, the bed unmade,
the silence is absolute,
occasionally a faint hiss of rain
or the scritch as the author
erases his own name.

--D. Nurkse

Copyright © 2009 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 

SPUD

In a deep tomb he lay,
a dark-hued pharaoh resting in peace.

In private, he shed grief-stricken tears
for the honest mud where he was hatched.

Here he is now on a plate, arrogant, boiled,
crowned with parsley, smeared with butter,

solitary like a newborn, he who saved
from hunger both the damned and the just.

Look, a thin knife cuts him in half.
Look, a fork sticks out of his back.

But, friend, don’t be sorry for them.
Don’t look darkly on the world of potatoes,

since other saviors in sacks are sprouting
hoping to see the polestar on a clear day.

--Milan Djordjevic, translated by Charles Simic

Copyright © 2009 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 

LANDSCAPE WITH ONE OF THE EARTHWORM’S TEN HEARTS

and also a small boy with a golden crossbow,
and a white rabbit full of arrows.
Also snow. And the sky, of course, the color
of a gently stirred winter soup.

I am the inert figure behind the barren apple tree.
The one who wonders for what purpose
the real world was created. I ruin everything by being in it, while one
of the earthworm’s hearts, deep in the ground, fills up the rest
of the landscape with longing, and fiery collisions, and caves
full of credit cards and catalogues. You can tell

I hear it, too, by the look on my face:
That inaudible thumping insisting without believing
one is enough is enough is enough.

--Laura Kasischke

Copyright © 2009 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 

THE URN GARDEN

They slid you free of the hearse
in a cardboard box shaped just like the boxes
florists use for their lanky roses,

but this box big as a man
with a night-green wreath where the face
belongs. I came because

I needed to know the right father
had died; to cast the borrowed coat
of my mercy down.

It takes four hours to burn
a person. I didn’t know that. Father,
I might have shopped,

or wept, or practiced naming
the rowdy morning birds by their calls
but I sat instead in the chapel,

made lists on some Kleenex,
then slipped loose at last
of your vast cold sleeves,

and wandered the young summer day
bare-armed, heavy with life,
a daughter no longer.

--Frannie Lindsay

Copyright © 2009 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

 


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