Mike Stone's "The Wheat Field" starts out like a painting and ends like a fever. For most of its length a thin, dark man stands in a field and stares at a woman near the horizon, his hands raised toward a "ghostly sun." Then a first-person voice breaks in ("In feverish dreams I crashed"), and we have to wonder whether the whole scene was a hallucination of longing, and whether the "I" is the man himself. The poem's central idea seems to be that desire doesn't just look at its object. It dissolves her into landscape, and in the process it dissolves the one who desires.
The merging begins almost at once. "Her" arrives before any noun does, and the woman never becomes a full person, only a set of parts: hair, shoulders, the "delicate folds of gown." Her "clear-earth hair" is an odd compound, as if hair and soil were one substance, and a few lines later it has become "wheat-colored," tinted by the field around her. The boldest move is the list "Breast, belly, thigh, pebble, creek bed." Its commas treat the body and the terrain as the same kind of thing, so the reader slides from flesh to stone to water without a pause. The gown "trickle[s]" like a stream. There is also something impossible here. She is "near the horizon," far off, yet the watcher sees her thigh. Judging by this, the scene is being built by imagination as much as by eyes.
The man gets the opposite treatment. He is "dark" and "thin" where she is "pale and shimmering," and his body is described in tense fragments with no verbs to move them along: "Arms tense, fingers twitching." "Hands, fingers, to a ghostly sun." Even "To feel, to caress" is only an infinitive, a wish that never becomes an action. Nobody in this poem touches anybody. The next line, "Slender trees at noon," has no verb and no person either. I read it as the man turning into a tree, rooted, arms like branches, standing at the hour when shadows are shortest and there is nowhere to hide. Both figures are absorbed into the scenery.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and the first half is built from short, isolated lines, often a single sentence to a stanza, which makes the stillness feel held, like a breath. Quiet s sounds hush the opening: "silently," "slightly," "slender," "shimmering." When the sound returns in the last stanza it has hardened, and the whisper becomes a hiss in "blistering surfaces / Of senseless visions."
That last stanza changes the poem's whole movement. The sentences now run over the line breaks ("I crashed / Through dimensions of existence / Far below"), so the reader tumbles down the page where before they stood still. The closing simile is the most unsettling image. "Nodes of broken light / Sliding over a spider web / Toward the center" is beautiful, but a web is a trap, and the poem never says what waits at its center, which leaves the dread to the reader. The "I" has become "scattered selves," plural and in pieces, racing inward. The final word, "shrivelled," is the harshest contrast the poem offers. The ripe, warm, golden field gives way to something dried up and shrunken. It is as if the dream of fullness has collapsed into its opposite.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it shows longing from the inside without ever calling it longing. The calm third-person opening turns out to be unreliable, and the last stanza makes us go back and notice how perfect the field was, how the woman was made entirely of its materials, and how the man never moved. Read again, the opening is the dream and the ending is the cost: a mind so fixed on one vision that it loses its own edges.