FIELD

Prelude

Standing outside the field by a hedge. Standing days and nights and more. The hedge became the indefinite present frame for the infinite vertical motion connecting the earth beneath the field to the air above it. It felt as if I’d fallen from the sky.

Where To, Hearing What

To a field or a meadow not mine, once more, get there, after a long metaphorical walk in mind, heart, soul, my heart, soul, mind, having walked through that special type of soft rain that bends the leaves and a forest of glass-blades only just so, then they stretch back to where they were, they bend then stretch out again, I’d hear a gentle rattle if I was much closer and smaller, but the way I am now, it's just a shapeless imagined hiss, hiss in the quiet field, or is it a meadow, not mine, then the thunder and roar as I listen and scan layers of past histories all present here and nowhere.

To a field for a promise, having walked past the pine trees that seemed to catch fire as I walked past them, that took on shades and flames of rosy red and orange, past the churches of convention and taste, past the peaks of trees that I can only see now suddenly move like they never did, is that rosy-red and orange hue a sunset, or is it blood.

To a field that could be a field or maybe a meadow, not mine. But to me it is at once field, meadow, and mine so I could go underground, and what is under the ground here matters as I hear matter.

If I was to paint it I’d like to be Leonora Carrington, because she could make any space feel enclosed and covered and yet strangely and compellingly other. If I was to write a fiction around the field I’d have to be Herman Melville, to write the field like he writes the sea, his perception so ingrained in oceans that he saw oceans even in fields.