A General Theory of Fields

We were close by Harford Bridge —
but please ignore the bridge,
our boots were never on it —

on a mild and lightly clouded day
of Spring, an imprecise expression
but close enough for present argument.
 
We had approached it from the east,
through other fields, upstream,
with the early Windrush, half
the occasion for the irrelevant bridge
and prodigal with marigolds,
by our right-hand side. We crossed a minor road,
the other half. If it ran between hedges
you might have called it a lane, but it did not.
There was a stile through a wall of local stone,
the eastern boundary of the field.
 
Vegetarians must excuse me, but
its shape was leg-of-mutton, just,
and nothing else will do.
That eastern wall defined its broader end.
Above us, on the left,
the straighter of two hedges marshalled
elder, hawthorn, hazel, and the like,
then, further in, a beech or two perhaps.
The lower, longer hedge curved back
to meet a fence that made the shortest, western side.
More thicket than hedge, that northern boundary,
replete with bramble, old stone walls, a hidden stream
which struggled to the river we had somehow left.
A bank rose up behind it, muting sounds
of traffic from a larger road.
 
But frontiers are subordinate to countries.
This was a republic exclusively of grass,
such grass as lets you think
it never has been otherwise for centuries.
In short, no mere field but creamy pasture,
though no beasts grazed it then,
where nothing flowered but grass
or seemed about to try.
 
Lastly, the slope, implied above,
was gentle everywhere but steeper on the left,
and rain had set the grass in contour rows
the way Van Gogh would paint it if we had him here,
but tighter, closer, than his brush or tube could render.
 
Like me, you know that field exists
though neither of us has it near at hand.
Now, physicists would dearly like to show
that day, and field, and all the intervals between
the day, the field, myself and you
are aspects of some greater unitary whole,
such that the field is and was the day and you and I
and all ways round again,
meaning this poem is already them, or they are it,
no matter what I write. A complicated,
pleasant and unpleasant thought indeed.
 
That field, located east and north
by Ordnance Survey grid at SP 129 226
(and by the way its shape is visible
even on the 1 to 50,000 scale),
should be as good a place as any
for reasonably patient physicists to sit and wait
until their place-collapsing theory comes along.
It was, at least, a perfect spot for lunch:
some shade for me and sun, by then, for her,
a slope to ease the legs
and, with no cattle, only harmless flies.
 
I threw an apple core carefully over my shoulder
like spilt salt, without looking,
but sensed it reach the even longer grass
beneath the southern hedge bank, near above us.
The point, for which not even physicists
may choose to wait much longer, being
that even then I knew, or more accurately,
my action or the apple core or the field
or any combination was well aware
that later or rather already but at another time
I was or would be writing this poem,
which could not become or be the case
had I thrown it away in a normal fashion,
by turning towards the chosen direction
and enjoying its lumpy parabola
much like Tartaglia or Bevis or Finzi before me
(or myself so often for that matter).
Not that they, forgive me, actually happened before I did,
but only in sundry other parts of "the field",
which is how Shakespeare and the other physicists
talk, or would like to be able to talk,
about the co-existential universe in question.
 
In sum, the unifying nub or core
of apple, field, poem, universe
pitched at an uncoordinated point
which I could never find again,
at least not closer than a dozen yards,
firstly, because I did not watch it then,
and secondly, because other carbon-based field-workers
have subsequently searched that seed-case out,
and then re-searched it into the ground
by publishing their results in the usual way.
A pip or two may have survived somewhere,
but, biologically confused by their commercial kidnapping
from one half of the planetary year across to the other,
they will not try for reproduction.
 
In the intervening weeks
when this poem both was and was not being written
I thought that it existed with and through
that unmarked apple core
even more than with or through the field itself,
but I feel less sure on paper.
All seed must die, no doubt;
what disquiets me is something else.
If all things always already inter-exist
what scope is there for particular relationships
like one between an apple from New Zealand,
an English poem and a, or quite possibly the
(it matters but is undetermined which)
common or universal field in Gloucestershire?
 
The physicists, who left a while ago,
have all my sympathy.
 
I hope for some from them.

 
Rip Bulkeley
If you've any comments on his poem, Rip Bulkeley would be pleased to hear from you.