I'm Adelaimone, 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, an 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. It is the corner of my eye that has seen them, walking quickly

past. It is a corner of my mind that has seen them, a startled glance,

then that glance widening. They have no belongings, no things that speak of displacement.

The field is askew with untended grass except where they have flattened it.

Have they been here the full length of the night, or just the previous hour?

Who are they for whom the grass is a bed?

Who are those others elsewhere sleeping in the open back of a truck or on the ground behind a

guarded fence? I am walking in the countryside, so maybe they are people of myth, or they are people

...