From the Desire Field

Natalie Diaz has made several explanatory remarks about this poem. In a note that accompanied its publication, she claims to have written it as a “poem-letter” to her friend, and fellow poet, Ada Limón, as part of a correspondence that took place over a period of several months. It is one of the first poems in which she addresses her anxieties, something Diaz felt capable of doing, because she was writing to a close friend rather than addressing an audience.

The poem begins with the speaker referring to her insomnia. She states that she is no longer going to call it losing sleep. She will invent a new term for it and then say she has lost that, just as the friend to whom she is writing lost her “rosen moon, shook it loose” (Line 3). This is an obscure reference and perhaps only Diaz and Ada Limón know what “rosen moon” refers to. (A company in the United Kingdom called Rosen Moon sells designer silver jewelry.)

In Line 4, the speaker presents herself as a horned beast. Perhaps she is thinking of the Minotaur in Greek myth, a beast that hid in a labyrinth. (In Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, one poem is titled “I, Minotaur.”) The labyrinth in the poem is the speaker’s feelings, and when she gets her “horns in a thing” (Line 4), she finds it hard to extricate herself from it: “it is a sticky and ruined / fruit to unfasten from” (Lines 5-6). Thus, she is wary of facing a particular feeling (which she will soon identify as anxiety) and is “trembling” (Line 7) about the prospect. However, she is determined to go forward with it. She names her difficult feeling in Line 8 for the first time: It is “anxiety,” and she decides to rename it to try and see it in a different way than she has up to that point. She calls it “desire” (Line 8) and, in the next line, “a garden” (Line 9). These terms suggest that the speaker is taking a new, positive approach to the anxiety she experiences during the nighttime hours when she cannot sleep.

In Lines 10-11, the speaker follows up on her use of the word “garden” (Line 9). She quotes the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936): “verde que te quiero verde” (Line 11). This is the first line in Lorca’s poem “Romance sonámbulo” (translated as “Sleepwalking Romance” or “Ballad of a Sleepwalker”). The line has been translated by William Bryant Logan as, “Green, how I want you green”; the same line occurs several times in Lorca’s poem. “Romance sonámbulo” is a mysterious dream sequence in which the speaker expresses his love for the color green and yearns for a woman whom he describes as having green hair and green skin. However, his desire remains unfulfilled.

Later in the poem, Diaz will echo Lorca’s longing for green, but in Line 12, she goes back to reference her use of the word “garden,” explaining that in the sleepless hours of night she is a field of desire, “of any worry ready to flower in my chest” (Line 13). Anxiety is thus reimagined or repurposed as something that can blossom as a flower rather than be destructive or destabilizing.

In Line 14, she returns to the Minotaur image, referring to her nighttime mind as “una bestia” (Line 14), which is Spanish for “a beast.” The speaker goes on to say that if she is not exhausted by having sex with her lover, then she spends “another night wandering in the desire field” (Line 17).

The speaker then returns to the image of green, as found in Lorca, in the phrase “low green glow” (Line 18) as applied to the night. The speaker admits in this line to being “bewildered” (Line 18) by her nighttime emotional wanderings, but she seems in the next three lines to minimize any negative connotations that the word might have: “belling the meadow between midnight and morning. / Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising / and many petaled” (Lines 19-21). The unusual image of “belling the meadow” (Line 19), or metaphorically attaching a bell to a meadow and listening to it ring, is life-affirming, as is the startling comparison of insomnia to a “many petaled” (Line 21) spring, blooming in all directions.

The next line, “the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow” (Line 22), continues to recontextualize the formerly disturbing experience of insomnia and anxiety. The speaker’s nighttime, awake mind now seems flooded with positive imagery. The mind may be jumping about all over the place, but the thoughts so generated are like leaping “gold grasshoppers” (Line 22), which completely reimagines the process as immensely valuable, even precious, and, like the previous image of “belling the meadow” (Line 19), absolutely life-affirming, with no trace of frustration or angst.

The speaker emphasizes how she is “struck in the witched hours of want—” (Line 23), alluding to the witching hours, which is a traditional Christian way of referring to the nighttime hours around three o’clock in the morning, when devils and demons are thought to be most active. Again, Diaz recontextualizes the traditional understanding. Her “witching hours” (Line 23) are rampant not with devils but with sexual desire, “want” (Line 23) being a synonym for desire.

She elaborates on this in the following lines, again returning to the Lorca image of green and applying it to making love with her partner: “I want her green life. Her inside me / in a green hour I can’t stop” (Lines 24-25). She continues to give expression to her overwhelming desire in an imagistic vision of sexual fulfillment, where their two gardens intertwine with a “[g]reen vein” (Line 26), a “green wing” (Line 26), and a “green thorn” (Line 27) entering each other’s bodies, and rivers bending and moving together. She concludes with the line “soy una sonámbula” (Line 30), or “I am a sleepwalker,” another allusion to Lorca’s poem.

The remaining eight lines of the poem mark a break. The speaker now directly addresses the friend to whom she is writing and speaks in a conversational rather than poetic voice. She acknowledges something the friend said to her earlier (Line 31), and she asks her permission to confess that she does not “feel good” (Line 33)—in spite of her efforts to reimagine the nature of insomnia. She also asks that the friend tell her a story, one that she has likely told before, since the speaker anticipates the calming effect it will have on her. The story is about planting sweet grass. Sweet grass is a plant that is much used and valued in Native American cultures. It is considered a sacred medicinal plant and is used on ceremonial occasions. It is braided into threads and burned to attract good spirits. In the poem, the speaker imagines that as her friend tells the story about planting sweet grass, she can “smell its sweet smoke” (Line 37), and this calms her restless desire (“this thrashed field” [Line 38]) and gives her peace. The speaker’s calmness is suggested by the final word, “smooth,” that is, calm and quiet, in contrast to the earlier “kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow” (Line 22), or the wild and thorny gardens of anxiety. In the end, the familiar friendship between the two women provides an antidote to the overwhelming growth of anxiety and insomnia that the speaker seeks to master in the previous verses.