KATE FELD
Strings 3
‘tongue for water’
May 2025
Vignette
Vignette is typically encountered in difficult light conditions. A flutter on your periphery. Vignette pauses to take a picture and the passing car noises pile up like laundry. The laundry piles up like applications, each garment seeking admission to the small hot chamber of her attention. Vignette performs all of the pastimes you have been led to expect: mending, sticking, scraping, wringing. In the place of her smile she has pinned a pigeon. This is intended to distract you, but – oh yes! You may feed the bird. Vignette’s coat is dirty. When she was at school, in Vignette Town, she sat at her desk and spoke clearly, a sharp pencil, but that’s a dream now. Meaning is accepted, a lukewarm hors d’oeuvre plucked from a hovering tray. Get that down you, the pigeon coos. Vignette sighs, the sound of a page turning, she does not have much ammunition – she has to cast the bullets from melted down paperclips and loose change pilfered from the bottom of the washing machine. So she had to become a crack shot. Your pigeon is showing; she is raising her gun. Vignette stays close to home. Footsteps semicircling back to the heart, small change gathered, the wash and wear cycle repeating. We cannot know what the future holds for someone like Vignette; I know it hurts but we have to turn away. When you wake in the raw elbow of night think of little Vignette, laundering the fog, and roll over. There’s a haze growing over the whole scene. The price of Vignette is worry, but don’t worry, you’ll forget.
Long song
long exposure
longing
longering (long lingering, lingering long or a longing that lingers, malingering)
longitude (loungeitude more like)
how long
so long
going down to longtown
long drag
another longhauler
and what is it we are hauling after us maybe the person we used to be
be long (ing) all the day til
long shadows fall
sing
sing
a long, long song
goodbye thing
you sing too long*
*Dr Seuss, Hop on Pop
PSA
If you are too tired or sick or dead to care anymore someone may be appointed to care for you. Someone may be appointed to bang your fingers til they unclench. They said it’s too late for you but here I am, banging away dear. Can you be separated from your misery? I know it’s the only decent outfit you have left; even the charity shop doesn’t give it away for free. I, too, have cared too much. There’s a tremor I let into my voice now. They just want to see you cry, honey. I’ve gotten so good at putting my feelings aside that they moved over there permanently. Does the starving woman stop to inspect the fruit she is offered for bruises?
taproot
I drew the unskilled worker short straw and got the hawthorn saplings which had self-seeded on the grass and had to be moved back into the hedge running along one side of the orchard. You get a big pitchfork and dig it in around the plant, loosening the compressed soil. You have to do this over and over, thrust the fork in and step on it and use your body weight to waggle it up and down. Repeat in a clockwise motion around the hawthorn until your whole trunk is aching but the soil is loose enough that the roots can be exposed. Then, bending the tree to one side you have to pull the taproot up along its length. It peels up a line of turf as it comes, the roots are thick and very hard; hawthorn is one of the hardest woods, and must be wrestled with and finally torn free or cut after a fashion by jumping on a big spade, positioned with its blade against a weak spot. The nice lawn gets all torn up, see you wouldn’t believe how long the roots are, what a distance they’re extending under the ground, how much of it they touch. The saplings should have been moved earlier but it’s the kind of job that always gets put off and only gets harder, so these weren’t babies but strong young hawthorn trees just coming into leaf. I was at work on a real monster when one of the men paused to watch me. The sun had come out and my jacket was bunched in the crook of an apple tree. He watched me working for a minute and said: ‘are you going to write a poem about it?’ My face did something because he said very quickly, in a tone of light amusement, ‘listen to me, I’m horrible aren’t I?’ I forgave myself for the nervous laugh, the feeble joke while my brain came back on with a bump and began reminding me of things like earlier that morning when we were getting our tools a newcomer had taken an interest in my writing and was asking me a lot of questions. My brain had registered that this man, a new friend of mine, was listening closely to our conversation, though he appeared to be paying attention to something else. My brain also reminded me that this man was interested in writing poetry but hadn’t done much of it. My brain was presenting me with these things as I blew my nose and bent again to the taproot and started pulling. Lord, how far can a taproot go? I pulled and remembered other men who had been unsettled enough to speak, unsettled by the purity of my concentration and engagement in my work; by the degree to which I take joy seriously. When I am wholly present in what I’m doing and have reached that unconscious state of non-being-in-making, this is always the moment when I seem to be the most interruptable to men. When I am least aware of their presence, I must glow with a kind of magnetism that draws them to me; when I feel most alive, I appear to them most in need of intervention. Maybe because there is no space for them between me and the world. But finally there’s a moment when it comes free and you can lift a living tree in your hand. You can see how fragile this monster really was all along. Plant it gently where there’s a gap, you’ll always find a place where some hawthorn could weave itself right over a hole in the hedge. Nettles and brambles and thorny boughs and prickly holly; reach past all that menace and muscle out a spot. Dig a hole and press the roots into it, tamping the soil down around it with your boot. It’s hard work and dull work, but it’s work that needs doing, work best done holding your love in your mouth like a stone. You may have to remind yourself that you’re preserving the integrity of the whole. Keeping things right. Sometimes I get tired and this starts to feel angry, and I think how long am I going to have to pull at these goddamn roots? Then it’s time for a break. I took a break on that big hawthorn, stuck my fork in the ground and walked away. But I came back and dug it up and replanted it here.
KATE FELD’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Stinging Fly, The Letters Page, Tolka and Hotel. Her poetry and photography pamphlet, Deeryard, is out with Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers. More of her writing can be found at katefeld.com.
