Fields

by Bren Simmers

after Brent MacLaine

Just as each field has a name

on a farm, the back field, the hill field,

the end of all known fields, the yard

contains smaller leas: the experimental

forest of asparagus and strawberries,

kitchen garden of fresh onion

greens and oregano, the perennial

berm and snow plow sunflower

bed out front that all the dogs water.

So too, the universe is made of fields,

the physicist said, and all the poets

went scrambling for their pencils,

those layers of carbon atoms that

when disturbed, propagate ideas

across the page, which is its own kind

of field, sewn together into signatures

in a book. Even the universe itself

is stitched together from seventeen

quantum fields into one giant electro-

magnetic quilt, just as grass is made

up of clover, chickweed, dandelion,

dock, plantain, and so on. The world

and everything in it, waves in a continuous

field. A particle, a body, in constant flux,

becomes fixed only when measured,

named. Meet me in the field

where language is undone.

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Bren Simmers is the winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. Her latest poetry collection The Work (Gaspereau Press) was a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Awards. She lives on Epekwitk/PEI. 

Photo by Mike Needham