On Looking

I’m sitting in front of a clean, paned window. It looks out on a field but, floor to ceiling, the scene is filled by honeysuckle, its sweetness and low buzz crowding in. Above, two oaks lean in from either side and touch. Through the chinks in the bush I can see the field lead, in scraps, to a far stand of pines.

I’m sitting in front of a clean, paned window, facing the mess of yellow-white-green. Here is my chance to see how bright the partial can be, the particular now. Last year when I stayed in a house nearby, my window framed a different field. But the window was screened and blurred my gaze so I had to focus on the sprawl of big forms—silver silo, far white fence—to keep my sight from slipping into the gray crosshatch of wire. I blinked and blinked to adjust my gaze.

The sun, angled low in the early morning, makes the window gauzy in streaks. Branch-shadows switch darkly across my face and slowly, from the wash of green, things step forth: the seedling ash as thin as a finger, but plush with leaves, notched and saw-toothed, as big as those on the full-sized tree; the milk-blue moths and the buttery ones. Two branches of honeysuckle stand straight up, lean into the place the bush will go next.

I missed the deer but saw in parts, through the bush, small bits of brown, a flicking of cream. A dipping of white as it stepped along. A brief drought pulling across the field as the deer moved into the woods beyond.

I asked my host if the honeysuckle is ever pruned in front of this house. I thought it might be rude to ask, but he said No, if you want you can. Here—he went to his car—I just bought these clippers yesterday. He squeezed the red handles, demonstrating. Do what you like.

And now there is thistle. Now a sight line. Already a goldfinch looping up. Already I am not satisfied, the field a bright glimpse and I want only more.

Had he said No, we just let it all go, I would have settled in with the tangle, learning it, diagnosing its moment-to-moment gestures. I would have studied the overleafed patches by which the distance was parceled and cut. Come to leaf ribs and spines in motion, the sound of rain sifting. Would have gone in and down, where, in the thick, matter intercedes for matter and leads to still more—recombinant, shapely.

I have not yet said that all this is occurring while my friend back home is dying. And that her dying is a hand upon it, a breath upon it and a frame.

This morning, early, I cut back more so the honeysuckle would tip like a cup and the field pour forth rye, milkweed, and chicory. If I knew better the kind of work I was doing, this work with distance, proximity, and sight, I could give it a name—for example, I’m painting. And purple the trunks, make of the blue-through-far-pines an odd spurt, a shot brightened, as if a spring were caught rising. Looking out, I could think so this is a bower, stand at the easel and feel the solidity of the room behind me. Feel the dark filling, like a theater, lending purpose to my gaze.

What do you do in an open field—if it one day occurs, is come upon? Sun and shade striping, the green lapping, tidal, the tide its own thinking. The laps and relapse, all the internal shifting. If there, in the field, is a threat circling, a fin in the green, in the too-green field. Swimming so fast. Relentlessly swimming.

If I went out to the apple and cut the black branch that hangs in my view, I could see, past the tree, a white spray of phlox, the flowers like sun spots, sudden in the field. The hanging black branch is swinging, distracting: it’s the slip of a pen, or a brush stroke misplaced. A flaw in the scene, too precisely there.

Where the glass warps, the far trees ripple with weird internal banners. I look through the glass refracting the field, making it fold and slip and blur. Out there is a bird drilling into rich hollows, breaking them down, taking the field, part by soft part, into its body.

The end of the day swells like a breaker, holds itself curled against the green field. Keeps itself brief above the grasses. Keeps itself sheer before it falls.

I push myself up from the chair after sitting and reading, and because I have been lifting heavy things in the last few days, moving furniture in this small house, and pruning, I feel a mild, affirming ache. Then I hear it.

At first I think wind is swelling-receding, filling the trees so they’ll lift and sigh flat. But then the exhalation keeps on, elongates, and looking up, it’s rain, that long, rolling boil, boiling over. Crushed honeysuckle is scenting the air. In the field beyond, timothy jackknifes.

I think I can make that happen again, so in the damp after-mist, I go out to work on the big dripping branch that interrupts the whole field. And once it is gone I can see further still. I relax my gaze. It feels like driving, the field stretching out. Like I am moving. Moving toward.

By morning, a fine, light sifting comes down, a wetness that isn’t exactly rain: a roiling mist like motes of dust; a prickling damp; pinpoints beading up the field.

Beyond, in the field, two purple finches meet above the thinnest grasses. They dip and hover—too heavy to land, but wanting the seed—then fly off to sturdier brush to rest. But my eye returns: the spot softens and browns. It worsens each day. In it, the gathered refusals of sun. In it, a thumbprint of heat and bruised air.

I can hold my arm out and squint, and one of the new blooms is a fingernail away from the first. I can lie down in the field and, reaching in any direction, touch one. But then there’s another and another beyond that.

Scattered and dotted, I cannot hold the flowers together in any bounded way. I cannot corral them, not with my arms flung wide, or my sight. They cluster and bend. They come up all over.

I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.

It’s some kind of butterfly: orange and black but smaller than the Monarch, smaller, too, than the Viceroy, something crazier that dips and flies up, scallops the air, looks like a kite a child is coaxing. Across the field its path is all sharp peaks and perfect troughs. Across the field means the whole way is clear and uninterrupted.

Even after all my work, the low brush and honeysuckle were still too close—too close to the house, too close to sight, and so my host came with big clippers and chopped the rest back.

And when he clamped the blades around the base of the bush and pulled the long wooden handles together, he made a little grunting sound. I heard it from inside the house, the intimacy of dismantling, and then a softer rustle as he pulled the branches free. His exhalation, that smallest breath came for the bush and marked its falling.

Then: a confetti of moths in a freshet of air, rising because the way was clear. Scraps of distance seaming up, all the flecks caught in rays, the motes aloft.

Then the oddest ache came: a body that small, and everything works—the up and the down inseparable, thoughtless; the motion-as-stasis; the most perfect eyesight; the two sets of wings, their colors like pangs of disbelief.

The way through the field is entirely clear. There is nothing between the far woods and me—just motes, moths, mouths, that coppery breath, the whole raucous force rising, breathing and turning.

The wild turkey moves with her chicks across the field, dips her head down and raises it, eating and picking in no hurry at all. Then she settles into the tall grass. I have the whole field, the view thrown wide, the rolling and sifting, but the liveliest part is not for the eye. She stays and stays. I want her to come out again, and when she does, her head is a spot of reddened grain.

With no dormer of green framing the sky, no honeysuckle scrimming the light, I expect the field now, the whole arrayed, expect the wide sweep in front of me—the curled fists of new ferns, the milkweeds’ closed hooves among the tall grass. Thistles. Daisies. The clamorous reach of purple asters.

Further off, the turkey is a drop of sound, oak, oak, far back in its throat, oak, wetly and darkly, only the sound burrowing in, finding a spot in the sway of grasses. The grasses lapping like a body of water.

Everything in the field has a name, one the eye pulls from the wash of green to steady itself: saw grass, timothy. And where the field stops and the woods begin? The abrupt edge, bird watchers say, a sheltering darkness made wholly of green.

Earlier in my visit, she would have appeared in smudges through the tangled brush, a flash of red, her brown-flecked body a crumple of patterns. Now she steps, for long moments, into the open.

Nearby, the chicks are learning their way through the field. A cool, almost cold breeze blows, and they stop. And when they move off again, they’re into the phlox.