Pastoral with Dog and Frank O’Hara

Late May, the field boasts

buttercups and purple asters.

The dandelions are fuzz.

I would boast proximity,

face to face with a lazy low-slung pine,

but I’m elsewhere, thinking

of the red room where a good

black dog once slept and slapped

her tail against the beige carpet.

I know the tiny spore-clouds

dervish-whirling over the field

are pollen and future flowers,

but maybe they are also the spirit

of a good black dog nosing her way

into my poem. Tammy, you’re in

pieces, I say to the air,

and it’s like love, all over me

and all out of reach. Or it’s like death,

bewildering and difficult

to explain. The first thing I look for

in a forest is a birch; it’s the one

tree I know well. Therefore: birches

at field edge, clustered in threes.

Two butterflies are courting

in the taller grasses, now flutter-fucking,

now two yellow lightships coasting

against the breeze. I’m far

from the red room, far from red,

though I feel a tight space in my gut

like an overlooked alcove: there’s

the red room and red. Not the red

of valentines or blood oaths. It’s the red

the dead leave behind, a loneliness

that’s not quite real. So Motherwell

once wrote to Frank O’Hara: One

never gets used to reality. One never gets used

to The Black Sun or the way

everyone and I stopped breathing. Every day

the field looks different

and I have to decide what I see:

the field or the page, the sky inverted

and green or the part of the desk

I can’t reach. Is it possible to be

tired of the field? I can write about it

in a poem or I can think about Tammy

or I can decide not to decide

because no one wants to stop breathing,

no one wants to leave home,

where the red room promises TV,

sauvignon blanc, and window shades.

And sometimes birch branches

reaching out from a porcelain pitcher,

a forest civilized and in miniature.

And sometimes a plate of cheese,

for now is the no man’s land

between lunch and dinner. I don’t

want to try too hard to explain

what makes me sad, or to suffer

too much to undo suffering,

though the field is also a dwelling

for shadows, for insects frail and

insignificant as lint and the owl’s

noisome midnight catch,

what I only know as dying things.

The thing is O’Hara should’ve said

shut up, and just paint the pictures,

but Motherwell said this to himself.

You don’t need a field to write a poem.

Who the hell said that? Oh. I did.