Field
The plaque said this was the oldest wall in the state.
It was stone, set by hand, and ran the length of a field,
splitting an unused road from incongruous grasses.
It was no less true to say the wall bisected the field.
(I could draw a diagram if provided paper.)
Let me start over: The wall sat along a field and an unused road.
It bisected them. Its line was shared by a mangled hedge,
or the suggestion of one. A jug of bleach, emptied and faded,
was jammed in there, in the wall, where maybe a stone had been,
where a stone once was. That doesn’t matter much
because here’s the thing: The field was glowing,
its busted patchwork woven with light from who knows where.
The weather-beaten stone, the mangled hedge, the incongruous
grasses: All glowing. Something was broken with this field,
like a mess of florescent tubing fallen from a busted sign box.
But I could’ve been wrong. Either the field was glowing
or I was full-on making this shit up, failing to see
the field as it was, as it would’ve been without me.
You want to take in the world plain, to know it clear,
to see so clean it’s like a thought. Like with this
felled wall running the disused road or the grass
like a busted patchwork. If I’ve yet to say it without adornment:
this field was teeming, totally lit up.
The field was blushing up on me.
I was blushing, full-on girlishly engrossed.
Like my merely standing there was gossip.
Like if I were here I shouldn’t say so.
Like if I was here it was wrong to know it.
Brandon Kreitler is the author of Late Frontier, selected by Major Jackson for the Poetry Society of America’s National Chapbook Fellowship, to be released in the spring. He’s from Arizona and lives in New York City.