From the Desire Field

Natalie Diaz

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Insomnia and Anxiety

If the poem is a meditation on desire, the impetus to write emerged from the speaker’s insomnia. She cannot sleep, as she makes clear in the first two lines, and the insomnia persists for many hours, as “between midnight and morning” (Line 19) suggests. It seems that this is also a recurring condition, not confined to just one night, and likely caused at least in part by anxiety. Insomnia in its turn produces more anxiety. The speaker is, however, determined to reimagine the distressing condition of sleeplessness in a way that will enable her to see it, as well as her anxiety, in a positive light. Natalie Diaz makes this clear right at the beginning of the poem, when she says, “I don’t call it sleep anymore. / I’ll risk losing something new instead—” (Lines 1-2). Instead, she roots them in natural imagery, making them part of the natural world, and thus less abstract and threatening.

Insomnia and anxiety thus constitute the basic physical condition and emotion from which the poem emerges. They are ripe for transformation through language by a poet and linguist who regards language itself as a physical thing that is capable of effecting change, with words carrying their own physical energy. The speaker in “From the Desire Field” wants new words for familiar but undesirable states in order to loosen their power over her and to allow for more positive energy to flow.

Desire

Desire is the new name the speaker gives to anxiety (Line 8). She then adds another new word to call it: a garden (Line 9). These new words are, as the saying goes, a game-changer. Desire and garden sprout and proliferate in ways that insomnia and anxiety—heavy words that weigh the speaker down—cannot do. Desire becomes a field; hence the title of the poem. Rather than being a state of deprivation and loss (of sleep), desire is presented as fecund, active, alive; the field is a meadow in spring, “surprising / and many petaled” (Lines 20-21); thus she transforms insomnia. The speaker is like a field of the night, in which “any worry [is] ready to flower in my chest” (Line 13). Worries that flower creates an unusual juxtaposition of terms; it shows the speaker’s manipulation of language to shape the kind of experience she wants. Desire may of course be many things, but in this poem it finds its best expression in the erotic desire of the speaker for her lover, which is described in terms of the color green. This associates it with the greening of the fields and meadows in spring. Erotic love, with its fulfillment of desire, is like a balm for anxiety; the speaker suggests that insomnia happens only when she is not “yoked to exhaustion / beneath the hip and plow of my lover” (Lines 15-16). As she traverses the nighttime field of desire she longs for her lover. Her desire is like a river: “I want her like a river goes, bending. / Green moving green, moving” (Lines 27-28). That river finds its fulfillment in the ocean towards which it flows, in this case the body of the beloved.

Calmness and Quiet

In the restlessness of her desire (which cannot entirely mask her discomfort with her inability to sleep) the speaker imagines another way to find relief beyond erotic fulfillment. This comes at the end of the poem, when she addresses the friend to whom she is writing. After saying, “I don’t feel good” (Line 33) she recalls how her friend would plant and later burn sweet grass. She wants to hear the story again and again until she can “smell its sweet smoke, / leave this thrashed field, and be smooth” (Lines 37-38). Up to this point, the poem has revolved around restless mental activity and the imagined enactment of physical desire, but now the speaker envisions a simple sense experience that would calm the mind, making everything come to a point of rest. Thus, the poem moves from insomnia and anxiety to desire and finally to calm in an image based on the smell of burning sweet grass. It is another example of how language can create the reality it describes—the speaker asks that the story of the sweet grass be told as many times as is needed to create the experience that she needs—the calmness that exists in friendship, beyond the thrilling yet tantalizing call of desire.