From the Desire Field

This free-verse poem does not employ rhyme, and its rhythms and line lengths vary widely. The poem is divided into units of one line, two lines, and three lines. These groupings do not occur in any particular order. The three-line units may be called tercets, which refers to a poetic unit of three lines. Usually, tercets are rhymed but they may also, as in this case, be unrhymed. The same holds true for two-line units, or couplets, which in this poem are also unrhymed.

The poem has a distinctive form on the printed page. The third line of all the tercets is indented, thus:

I want her green life. Her inside me

in a green hour I can’t stop.

       Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

(Lines 24-26)

(This is the only tercet in which the third line is long; in other tercets, the final line is shorter than the other two.)

Some of the two-line units are indented on the second line, and some are not:

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,

                     hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,

then I am another night wandering the

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