Brian Johnson

WHEAT FIELD WITH CYPRESSES (1889)

The wheat leans in every direction, but has its own life. A field is a private domain—no one knows that, how little of the field is public, how little of it you can really find. Being there, in any picture, means you agree to getting lost; you consent to lying down or being led around, your condition less important with each step, your belongings soon forgotten. The trees jostle one another, olive-olive, cypress-cypress, and on the horizon, the hills repeat themselves into a neverending blue. As clouds float through their positions, shapes rolling across without fanfare (all afternoon, a lazy proceeding), the land below it seems to tremble, as if by orchestrated force, a set of winds blowing on the wheat and riding it. I want it to stop: the beauty is wild, overwild. Where can I find a picnic, a family, on a Sunday, with a blanket and wine, as seems fitting? A hint of a road in the lower right corner, yes, some signs of a cart, trampling, a trip through it, but all of this to no avail. People don’t belong.


BRIAN JOHNSON is the author of Torch Lake and Other Poems (Web del Sol, 2008) and Site Visits, a collaboration with the German painter Burghard Müller-Dannhausen. His work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.


Issue Thirteen
$15.00

ISSUE THIRTEEN features poetry by Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Rick Barot, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Camp, Laura Cronk, William Virgil Davis, Chelsea Dingman, Erica Ehrenberg, Robert Fernandez, Gabriel Fried, Tracy Fuad, David Gorin, Jennifer Hasegawa, Stefania Heim, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Ish Klein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Kondrich, Keetje Kuipers, Anna Leahy, Alessandra Lynch, Alicia Mountain, Allan Peterson, Iain Haley Pollock, Adrienne Raphel, Emily Rosko, Lauren Shapiro, Adrienne Su, Cole Swensen, Tom Thompson, Anne Waldman, G.C. Waldrep, and Stella Wong; fiction by Rachel Lyon and Benjamin Niespodziany; nonfiction by Angela Ball and Joanna Luloff; a film essay by Gustavo Pérez Firmat; and Anne Waldman in conversation with Sandra Simonds.