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.
I just love this poem! It’s what I would call realistically pessimistic in message but so beautiful in its imagery that the final thaw is welcome.
Six years later… I just saw this. Thank you for your kind words! This was written during my mother’s final illness, and is, I guess, seeking reassurance in the fact that even as we face endings, the world reveals ongoingness wherever we look.