THE FIELD

by David Hawkins

 

 

Into a field of blue vervain
     & warm sticky stems of wild phlox
a couple walks. He carries a bottle

of wine, she glasses. They are drunk
     on the cooling last wisps
of sunlight threading through

a stand of trees at the field’s edge.
     She believes the field is temporary,
the small task of flowers night

will soon quell; that each sorrow
     has a name: the sour chokecherries,
the sweeter mulberry. Only the symbol

is infinite, she thinks—someone dies,
     someone is born, sex continues
its dark work deep in the trembling pistil.

But he is struck by the sudden blue swell
     at twilight & his dull urge to pray.
He thinks the trillium, its ovate petals

alight in the low fire of sunset, is enough.
     The couple does not speak. Instead
taking wide, slow steps as if a child

trudged quietly between them, they walk
     amid the unbroken hymn
of bottlebrush, each so separately

absorbed they don’t notice their footsteps
     beneath a giant cedar have startled
an ear-full of waxwings—& when they stop

to look up, the tree’s thin branches shudder
     as the birds kiss it away & curve 
in unison into the sun’s last path of light.

 

 

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