Pastoral

Jennifer Chang

 
Something in the field is
working away. Root-noise.
Twig-noise. Plant
of weak chlorophyll, no
name for it. Something
in the field has mastered
distance by living too close
to fences. Yellow fruit, has it
pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field. Coreopsis. I did not mean
to say that. Yellow petal, has it
wither-gift? Has it gorgeous
rash? Leaf-loss and worried
sprout, its bursting art. Some-
thing in the. Field fallowed and
cicada. I did not mean to
say. Has it roar and bloom?
Has it road to follow? A thistle
prick, fraught burrs, such
easy attachment. Stem-
and stamen-noise. Can I lime-
flower? Can I chamomile?
Something in the field cannot.
 
From The History of Anonymity by Jennifer Chang. Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer Chang. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.

Poems by This Author

Again a Solstice by Jennifer Chang
It is not good to think
Freedom in Ohio by Jennifer Chang
I want a future
Sonogram by Jennifer Chang
Dark matter, are you
The Skin's Broken Aria by Jennifer Chang
I cross the street


Further Reading

Poems About the Natural World
And the Intrepid Anthurium
by Pura López-Colomé
Belong To
by David Baker
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
Crossings
by Ravi Shankar
Farewell
by John Clare
February: The Boy Breughel
by Norman Dubie
Field
by Erin Belieu
Fish Fucking
by Michael Blumenthal
For-The-Spirits-Who-Have-Rounded-The-Bend IIVAQSAAT
by dg nanouk okpik
Four Poems for Robin
by Gary Snyder
God's World
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In a Blue Wood
by Richard Levine
In Michael Robins’s class minus one
by Bob Hicok
Kentucky River Junction
by Wendell Berry
maggie and milly and molly and may
by E. E. Cummings
Naskeag
by Alfred Corn
October (section I)
by Louise Glück
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
by William Wordsworth
Of Many Worlds in This World
by Margaret Cavendish
Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Russian Birch
by Nathaniel Bellows
Song of Nature
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spontaneous Me
by Walt Whitman
The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
The Gladness of Nature
by William Cullen Bryant
The Leaves
by Deborah Digges
The Noble Nature
by Ben Jonson
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound
The Wind and the Moon
by George Macdonald
Trees
by Joyce Kilmer
Two Butterflies went out at Noon— (533)
by Emily Dickinson
Winter Morning
by William Jay Smith
Work Without Hope
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge