how can the fields continue as simple fields?

Unsent Letter to Jakob / By Jackson Holbert

When the pills entered my life / I knew what to do, but I didn’t / know what to do when they stayed. / When I was young the river was just / the river. And now it’s still / the fucking river. On a Saturday, / last winter, the light changed. Every color / backed away into the past and became / all at once, incoherent, immutable. / There is no explaining it. All I know is that / neither of us could stop it. And I’m not sure / if I’m interested in stopping it. Not anymore. / Though I think of you all the time / my memories still vanish like salt. God / knows what is doing the vanishing—/ my vague and ever-widening / insanity, the pills themselves. Someday soon / I will lose your hair, your ears, your hands, / the color of your first car, the first names / of your parents, and what’s left / after that? The fucked up trees? / The shitty sky? The long, cold river?

by Joanna Klink

And to have come this way for nothing. To see my own skin’s shallow glow against the cool wood of the porch swing, holding out my arms. The breezes I created leaning back into me. I was swinging against the empty day, against the rain’s copper pitch, against summer. Someone banged out piano scales and I swung against them, the lack of silence. I was a guest in that house, feathering shapes in my head out of snow, a quiet above the porch-boards emptying through meadows and rose windows. Sun fell like mist from an opening in the clouds above farmlands, the hills sometimes lifting like waves. I was host to disappointments that were not mine. I watched a few weeds glint in the woods, felt dry lilacs browning, was unseen minister to stray things that could resist blurring. Wet leaves against water. Glass bowls by the high windows. But now these are dreams, they are plain tombs.

Why such painstaking care in sitting on a swing — breathing, as if I could float back into the precision of myself within the white hours of afternoon, hung from clean beams by chains made stiff by rust. Their cold metal links turning warm in my palms. Have I not changed at all, folding my legs beneath me, bracing for the next unspoken need, the blind demand to stand and shoulder what I had no hand in creating. The sound of windchimes beaten gold.

by E.E. Cummings

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn't expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy