Miranda Field

Miranda Field was born in 1962 in a North London suburb, and came to the United States in 1981. She attended Carleton College, The New School, and the Vermont College MFA Program. Her work has appeared in AGNI, BOMB, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Field’s first book, Swallow (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), won the Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize. Currently, she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at The New School, and lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Tom Thompson, and their two sons.

Childhood’s House

Dogs guard each approach:

one to the widow’s walk’s every vantage point.

One humor for every aspect

of the wind: ill-tempered, selfless, obedient, obstinate.

Then the four daughters of the house

start to stir, then wander, then the dogs begin

slackening to fattened hogs.

And lie there sighing and melting

in the rich ground under our apple trees.

I’m the daughter who hits the dogs with sticks

for asking for too much too often.

But my hunger equals theirs: recidivist

scroungers, with what license should I shame them?

They have such finite lives. Sevens and sevens…

One of them as I speak, all humility, feeds a lilac bush her flesh.

Flowers of May. My birthday flowers.

My voice is a short leash. It hurts her to listen,

since she can’t answer. But the others, when I don’t call them in

they wander. Out of the pen of slavish

adoration into wilderness.

Miraculous Image

When an effigy cries,

the wood she’s carved from rots.

Tears, tight-reined, migrainous

implosions. Two trenches

of decay down the cheeks,

the dress wearing itself

away, the heart’s embroidered

harness. And inside,

never intended to be seen,

naked, breathing,

wormholes, striations of the grain.

What holds the parts in place:

glue of knackered hooves.

Such havoc the pierced hands

wrestle—the soft blue mantle of Heaven

melts about the body,

the body shriven, its gilt

stars of scabbed paint

flaking off. Leaven.

How our undressings lift us…

A sacred thing undone grows brave,

a convict with nothing

in the world to lose—

the baby sheds his baby fat,

his gold hair calms, mouse-brown.

Epiphanies glance off him then,

a human thing, and hungry.

Scold’s Mask

Before the tongue wags,

caliper the tongue. The tongue delivers lashes.

Buckle the mask to tourniquet the tongue.

The mule-snout of the scold’s mask

blunts the pointed finial tongue, the hasp-tongue

back to loaf-shape, to shovel-shape,

to food, to tool, to good machine, to tabernacle

of intentional action. Not toy

that wills itself to whirring in the toy-box.

The atmosphere the tongue lies bedded in—

the tongue’s environs—

makes an ideology of its lewd motions.

A mildew in the market.

A pathogen in the aspic.

Cut off the flow that feeds the tongue,

or twist or tie it tightly.

Or stuff the hole it cobras from with gauze.

Tonight, the tongue is a particularly muscular vine.

Tonight it redoubles its efforts to ascend

Heavenward. The husband-tongue, the “love-muscle” tongue.

What miracles of synchronized swimming,

what exquisite tension between buried root and forcefully

arrowing-forth prow…. It’s hard to hood this.

One tongue finds another to entwine,

one tongue grows a bindweed round another’s stem.

And consider carefully this ramification of the stickiest index:

its extremities are relentlessly expansionist

but slow motion, transfixing with sense

whatever they contact. And of all members mobilized

by voluntary acts, this exceeds by far all others

in numbers and varieties of its intentions.

But if caught in time, it can be constricted in childhood.

It can be ratified, espaliered. It can be trained

to arabesques of sexual servility. And citizenry.

It can be sectioned. And seduced to science.

It can be stilled for years, and stiffened.

But by an insidious magic is rendered stretchy again—

by certain essences, by liquors, yes, by questions.

And when released extends its pliant self.

And waves like a monarch from her cordoned carriage.

And bends back constantly to self-excite.

And lavishes its machinations on the orchid-pulse,

on the honey-pot, the homily, the come-on.

The muscles that move the lips

and mouth of man and the human tongue

are more numerous and subtle than any other animal’s.

Whatever the tongue supplies,

its poisons or its balms,

there’s an open market for. But an indentured source.

Subway

At first the meaning won’t come out from hiding:

a piston-motion, a tongue-flickering, urgent

but contained. What it does is not come. What it does is

hold back and beckon, fire off its small explosion

in your brain: desire to penetrate the bulwark

distance. He wants you to see. He takes the weaponry

of looking, bends it back. The boy miles off, safe.

The boy untouchable—on the far platform,

such a fortress built between you, such a crow’s-nest

distance, and the smile you can’t see says

so far off you don’t exist…

But you are here, and his shape pins the air

above the tracks, lit figure in a black space any eye can enter.

Not public, this place he makes, hammering

the locked dark with his fist, in the slip between rush hours.

Private, though you’re invited in.

The boy leans forward, propped by nothing,

his prick in his hand lost in the glittering latitudes

of white, identical tiled walls, then seen, then unseen…

Small crux of flesh. Forest of rusted girders. Lost context,

buried city nothing enters without a toll.

And tunnels into it and tunnels out open in the shadows: valves

velvet with soot, the thought opening and shutting:

The train is coming / the train will never come…

The ending of the boy’s tension, crescendo, holds back,

keeps refusing to yield, to you, to him, insists

it will stay, insists it will always be

about to end—nagging ghost of the choked-off, the buried—

the way a child stands still and holds her breath

until her lips darken, carotids blue and knotted in the frail neck.

See me? Watch me die. In the dark

he will not come. In the dark his work

has no reward, the cap tipped down, the—he could be anyone,

one tile, one shout inside the city’s wash of sound—

lottery of flotsam on the downtown platform.

On the walls, urgent scrawls: In a cradle of sand,

an endless storm blows…but words are old, thoughts

oxidize. Exposure to the rush hour burns, the breathed air

burns. There is a war. There always is. And words

go missing from the messages

that line these walls, signs papered over signs…

At (place name erased) twenty-four-hour workdays

fill an order for five thousand body bags…

Signs speak quietly. Signs whisper,

and workers work overtime, work nights, nights…

The bones, tendons

in the white wrist pumping, pulling, so much work

to be done to accomplish one small explosion.

The neurons fire, the mind feeds on the spark—meaning: yes—

motion of stitching?—no—engines?—yes—motion of pistons…

Beneath the shut-tight lid, beneath the hood

of any machine, obsessive repetition, invisible hands…

It’s quiet, the dark air, secretive.

Inviting, this dark cave, smelling of piss, hidden,

though he insists you see, and you work hard to see,

and you work secretly. Not to be seen seeing, yes. Anyone

can enter it like this: the private sector of this public darkness.

Housefire

The spark struck in secret under the stairs in dust

in the cellar smolders the way a face does, and the life

inside it, after a slap. A mortification, stains

on the floor of a caged thing’s cage. In dust

in the cellar where our bicycles lean

broken-antlered in the dark. Among molds

in the cellar where the cat swollen with poison

curls in the damp to extinguish herself. It’s dark outside;

inside the dark becomes particles a little like rain

stilled. Behind chicken-wired glass the garden

shakes a few leaves down. Most of winter’s work is done,

the pond lidded, the ruts of the bicycles’ wheels

cast in iron. The fire begins by itself, a breathing-life-into,

a kindling: cells of our skin, soil from the garden;

tinder for the fire’s insistence. The fire has been impatient

to begin all along. The house is its accomplice.

Roots of the black walnut hold tight the foundations,

hence nothing grows here, nothing flourishes.

But flames brush the root hairs, make them stand on end.

Like a story’s ending, not quite to wake us is the fire’s

intention. To stroke us with its smoke, our sleeping faces.