Oberlin College Press

FIELD #80 (Spring 2009)

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

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

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

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