I'm Adalimone and this is The Slowdown.

I am prone to making up stories about strangers I see from a distance.

Even as a kid, I delight in giving someone I didn't know a whole invented backstory.

It was a way of imagining that I could be them in another life, that somehow, if I could

allow them a complex narrative, we might not be strangers after all.

In today's poem, we see how the speaker observes two people sleeping in a field.

In that moment of observation, the question about who the sleeping people are becomes

deeply entwined with the question about who the speaker is as well.

The Field by Rick Barrett Two people are asleep in a field.

The light is not yet up.

The air is cold even though it is summer.

I cannot get closer than where I am.

I know only so much about them.

I know they are not dead.

I know they are asleep because one of them has moved just enough to show it is a movement

you make in sleep and adjustment of resting weight.

I don't know if it is romantic that they are in this field or if it is drunkenness or

despair.

From this distance, their clothes are black.

They are two men or a man and a woman or two women.

I am not near enough to learn what their bodies are or how proximate or distant from each

other.

...