Manual for the First Field
I.
Our independent study class
is learning about lower circuits.
“I see no reason to go over it again.
It just gets prickly. It attacks whoever tries to look at it directly.”
Let’s go over it again. Attack is one word for it.
Scratch the verb, scratch the noun.
What does it feel like when I say pose?
What does it feel like when I say apology?
The play gets repeated at certain sections,
the chorus in particular. You have to pay to be the lead
in time and effort but it tells you that you can develop skills
of memory. This letter for you: the letter “u”
the flip side of cultivation
is spontaneous recognition of friend.
If the first confluence of directions
is a welcome gift, the second
is resting nearby in security. The light fields
slowly growing up. A field in the sky.
Could you find me water? You want me to pay
more attention to you? I don’t want to be a machine of that.
It’s grunt work to approve or assess
an effort. My direction is
my agreement. My project
an experiment in working together.
Who will be there with me?
II.
Is this fence electric? No, they said. Think metal garden beds.
A guy needs space, his own area. Zones where he goes all out
like sometimes I can’t stop talking, prisoners walking in circles.
Tightly I don’t know why I can’t get over
automobiles, ancestral outrage from plants we now call petroleum.
I know my bike don’t grow on trees or come down with rain.
Animals feel pollution as pain. Land apart. Rare metal in rain.
Exactly what do you see, when I say confinement?
Solo figure. House cloud. A real person.
Monk of suffering, begging again.
Say it is home and go there. A bed.
Land apart. After the medication,
the figure appeared in their ten gallon hat.
You’d been told of this replication.
You can let it go. Story of someone who lives in a mirror.
A guy dries out. Can I claim to be free from intoxication?
That depends how much alive I am now in former times.
Do I miss the spirits? Do I miss the winding weeds?
I do not. Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now
somewhat over the choppy waves.
so that I can handle
what I am willing to enter
the circle again, is there clean air?
the circuit o, o, only now.