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| JENNIFER DENROW 2011 |
You were the white field when you handed me a blank
sheet of paper and said you'd worked so hard
all day and this was the best field you could manage.
And when I didn't understand, you turned it over
and showed me how the field had bled through,
and then you took out your notebook and said how each
time you attempted to make something else, it turned out
to be the same field. You worried that everyone
you knew was becoming the field and you couldn't help
them because you were the one making them into fields
in the first place. It's not what you meant to happen.
You handed me a box of notebooks and left. I hung the field
all over the house. Now, when people come over, they think
they're lost and I tell them they're not. They say they're
beginning to feel like the field and it's hard because they know
they shouldn't but they do and then they start to grow whiter
and whiter and then they disappear. With everyone turning
into fields, it's hard to know anything. With everyone turning
into fields, it's hard to be abstract. And since I'm mostly alone,
I just keep running my hand over my field, waiting.
Jennifer Denrow received a PhD in Poetry from the University of Denver. She is the author of the poetry collection California (2011) and the chapbooks A Knee for Life (2010) and From California, On (2010). She currently resides in Colorado, where she writes and teaches.
Use the link below to read another poem by North American poet JENNIFER DENROW:
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/untitled-more-i-go-harder-it-becomes-return
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