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# An Excerpt from Jennifer Firestone's Gates & Fields
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/excerpt-from-jennifer-firestones-gates-fields/
- Published: 2017-04-05T11:00:58.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:41:20.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected an excerpt from Jennifer Firestone's Gates & Fields for her bimonthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/04/simone-kearney-fence-crop.jpg)

“Fence,” Simone Kearney (2013), oil on canvas. 22 x 30 inches (image courtesy the artist)

Milk to the land whitens

A horse might surely tread A path

The wheat wet A shadow-sun

A path might find a horse’s tread

*Did I not promise, rise to this?*

The sun red

The bell escaping

*I am not surely dead*

The carriage halts, the morning breathes  
The carriage shakingly aware

The carriage halts upon the ground, wheels stir without a sound  
The carriage drives from day to night, from dawn to dawn, a burning light  
The carriage gathers thoughts lifts them to the sky as birds  
The sky as birds the carriage leads, the sky as birds the carriage leaves

What became one became none

again and again an eye spots an eye

again and again a sea cries to sea

*Oh are you near*

who might be listening

again and again place the word to the air

just there

again and again the carriage will stop

and she will listen

Rest in its deepest states  
we name slumber  
And the field covers her  
again and again

And if you and you are here then say itsay it  
I am but one and you are many  
Lights in the day ringing

And a gate might open  
To a gate

Might open

\* \* \*

Jennifer Firestone was raised in San Francisco and now lives in Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College (The New School). Her books include [*Gates & Fields*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0988539969/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com)(Belladonna\*), *Swimming Pool* (DoubleCross Press), [*Flashes*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1848612257/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (Shearsman Books), [*Holiday*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1905700539/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (Shearsman Books), *Waves* (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), *from Flashes* (Sona Books), *snapshot* (Sona Books), and *Fanimaly* (Dusie Kollektiv). Firestone is the recipient of the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press Robert Creeley Memorial Prize.  
*Gates & Fields* is available to [preorder from Belladonna\* Collaborative](http://www.belladonnaseries.org/gates-fields/?ref=hyperallergic.com) and will be released May 15, 2017.