The Fields Want
Us to Walk Upright

"It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright." – Transtromer, from "Standing Up"












I

Finally on our way back down the bluff, along the asphalt road which used to carry the crushers and quarry equipment, we passed a woman with sunglasses on. It was nearing January. No matter these days that it was fifty degrees. The sky that color of the robins' eggs. A false excitedness had filled the air all along the ridge above as if the wild, perhaps gullible, that perhaps winter would be forgiven this year and we might skip right to spring. The woman could see nothing and as we passed she lifted her hands to her eyes and said blindly 'it feels like spring.' All the woods had been transparent. No leaves to stitch a remaining fabric. Crooked limbs revealed. Without the growing towers of leaning snow all the romance of the woods had been forgone for what we could see as its truest survival: the craggy trunks of the stone bound pine or birch trees sipping from thin stocks and the seeds and walnuts had already been hoarded. Nothing to read; no secret tracks along the frozen cheeks of the snow. We had walked in among the curled detritus of the limestone quarry, no doubt used for the base of highways and interstates. Old shacks, half-walled, surrounded by power lines, the perfect architecture of extraction. Short stacks of mud to gravel. Little pits. False roads that now curved in around the long white candles of birch. The woman we would later pass would walk right through with her sunshades on, her hands over her forehead. Old rock, vertebrae, houses of the world, used to reach blindly themselves to the sky and a similar sun had loved.