"Field of Vision" by Caroline Stevens

​Caroline Stevens is a queer poet from Minneapolis. She is currently a second-year MFA student in poetry at Vanderbilt University, and serves as the editor in chief of the Nashville Review.

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Field of Vision

Tell me the story again, the one where
she and I both wanted what we now have:
 
sunny room where the only audible noise
is what comes out of us, our animal song.
 
The way she tends to herself, carefully,
after a shower, steam lifting off skin
 
as she pulls a comb through long wet hair
like a child guarding a snail shell. How
 
the only line between presence and memory 
is the shape delusion’s shadow casts 
 
on the wall. This morning, for example,
I could have sworn I saw her silhouette 
 
behind the curtains at the kitchen table 
with coffee, waiting for me to wake 
 
so she could leave the first mark on my day, 
as easy as the crescent moons left from my nails
 
in the ripening tomatoes. Longing’s colors
stack neatly, horizontally, like an Agnes Martin
 
painting—blues so pale they seem white,
the pencil lines invisible until another step 
 
closes the space between face and canvas.
Let’s go back to Madison, or Duluth, 
 
somewhere the horizon meets the still lake
in the same shade of blue, where the only way 
 
to remember that the two never 
actually meet is to believe it.