In poet Miranda Field’s delicate meditation on the acceptance of finality (“winter’s wreckage”), the poet reveals the landscape of a heart. 

Coda

By Miranda Field

so long as Earth’s atmosphere sloughs off its veil like layers

so long as sufficient light slips into crevices of dark woods

so long as some make good time on their travels in elegant tin foil shoes while others lumber
           on in wooden clogs

so long as crumbling rock-face faces capable ravine

so long as light bleeds into air into rain

so long as beads of rain on branches encapsulate clouds

so long as winter’s wreckage is reflective: ice-slivers in creeks, mica in spiderwebs
so long as sweetness to oblivion and back again
and back again
so long as facts and interpretations carried to gravesides equal facts and interpretations
expressed by mosses and fungi / frost flowers and algorithms
so long as the moon’s stare persists
so long as an owl listens
so long as owl to mouse to blood to bracken

lo long as eye and ear gape open

so long the thaw

so long will come

Published with the permission of the author.

Miranda Field’s first collection, SWALLOW, won a Katherine Bakeless Nason Literary publication Award. Her work has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Discovery Prize. She teaches in the Creative Writing programs at Eugene Lang, NYU, and Barnard College, and has a second collection of poems forthcoming from Four Way Books.