FIELD #67 (Fall 2002)

  CONTENTS

Denise Levertov: A Symposium
David Young "To the Reader": The Speech of Mountains
Marilyn Chin Notes on "Hypocrite Women"
Fred Marchant "Life at War": Mere Regret
Marianne Boruch "An Embroidery: (IV) Swiss Cheese": Two Veils
Arthur Sze "The Malice of Innocence": Running Style Poetics
Carole Simmons Oles "In California During the Gulf War": Her Jerusalem
****
Bruce Beasley Lord Brain
Jennifer Atkinson Seduction with Gold Pendant
Richard Robbins Glare
Baptismal Font
Eric Pankey The Coordinates
James Grabill Cinnamon
After a Long Struggle
Timothy Liu Anniversary
Of Thee I Sing
Angie Estes Paramour
Chez Nous
Boyer Rickel Coincidental
Ellen Wehle The Book of Hours: January
Maid of Honor
Kurt S. Olsson Santa Barbara
What Kills What Kills Us
Rynn Williams Islands
Big Yard
Michael Chitwood Federal Reserve Notes
Marilyn A. Johnson Midway
Vineland
Will Wells Spring Fever
Elisabeth Murawski Puella
Jennifer L. Knox Love Blooms at Chimsbury
Julie Larios God, Aware of Free Will, Asks a Favor
Nance Van Winckel No Possible Lead for the Whale Story and the Bureau Chief Passed Out
Lu Yimin American Women's Magazines
The Ink Horse
If You Can Die, Go Ahead and Die
Karen Rigby Poppies
Vitruvian Man: Study of Two Figures
David Baker Post Meridian
Regan Good What I Saw and What It Said
Kathleen Peirce Slow Song
Shirley Kaufman from Translation
Anmarie Trimble Dream of Daily Bread
Robert Gibb Turtles
Octopus
Ander Monson Astonish
Liu Tsung-yuan Exile in Ch'u
Morning Walk
Billy Collins You, Reader


ISLANDS

Bruised purple leaves, soil made from blossom,
the strange yellow mushrooms that appear
overnight--it's as if she were standing on the edge
of a thought that would draw all the strands into one.

And he, after preparing the kindling, a perfect tower
over leaves and scrap paper--triage, consolidation--
goes through a door in the privet hedge,
and the light shifts.

The noise from the waterfront deck of The Dory--
that offhand banter--has become necessary to them
as darkness and clean linen. Intimacy has no hold
on the present, the garden, the fire where he places the grill
and the fish, gills falling open, the mouths, the articulate jaws
set, as if sewn. The short, rusted legs of the picnic table
have sunk in the sand.

The bruise will go from black to blue to yellow.
And the purple along the fault lines of the basil
is somewhere between the tomato vine and her vision
of what could have been--
the eyes of the fish turn opaque.

--Rynn Williams

Copyright c 2002 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.


TURTLES

Rubblework and bedrock,
The pillared shells drift across
That quadrant of sunlight
And dust in which heat is still

Murderous at four o'clock.
For hours now we've made
Our slow way through the zoo's
Sour tenements, past

The torpor of great cats, bears
Pole-axed by August.
Past each replicated landscape
We descended the stair

To stand watching turtles
Ferry their plates above
The salt tides of the blood--
Shells rifted and scarred

As if by glaciers, the soft parts
Of the mosaic pebbling their skin.
They seemed to me again
To have simply been uncovered:

Cobbles of the living rock
Left by those waters,
Their massed hearts, tidal,
Lifted into the sun.

--Robert Gibb

Copyright c 2002 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.
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