From the Desire Field

“Grief Work” by Natalie Diaz (2015)

Initially published in Poem-A-Day on Poets.org and reprinted in Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), “Grief Work” presents the notion that grief work—the process of dealing with one’s grief—can be done with a lover as part of love making, and this can transform the grief in each person. After lovemaking, “We are rearranged,” the speaker states. Diaz is often eclectic in her choice of sources, and in this poem she references one of the Mares of Diomedes in Greek mythology, which were a herd of man-eating, uncontrollable horses, one of which was Lampon. In this poem, Lampon is “a shining devour-horse.” The speaker identifies with it (“I, the terrible beautiful Lampon”); it resembles her identification with the Minotaur in “From the Desire Field.” Also, as in that poem, she emphasizes the color green in “Grief Work.”

“Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” by Natalie Diaz (2013)

This poem is an erotic paean to love making, presented in all its physical delight as a celebration of the lover’s hips: “O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped / the amber—fast honey—from their openness—.” It is the kind of poem that needs to be heard, not just read. Diaz read it aloud at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in March 2014 at the National Geographic Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington DC.

“To His Mistress Going to Bed” by John Donne (1669)

Although Diaz has forged her own unique style, those readers familiar with the Western poetic tradition may hear in a poem such as “Ode to the Beloved’s Hips” some echoes of this much earlier erotic poem, by English 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne. He also, like the speaker in Diaz’s poem, celebrates the body of the lover and the pleasure it brings him: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go, / Before, behind, between, above, below. / O my America! my new-found-land.” The eroticism of the poem must have raised some eyebrows in its day, since it was refused a license for publication in the first edition of Donne’s poems in 1633; 36 years went by before it appeared in print.

“Warming Her Pearls” by Carol Ann Duffy (1987)

Duffy is a British queer poet. In this poem, set in an earlier time period, the speaker is a maid who has erotic thoughts about her mistress. The mistress is beautiful and the maid longs for her physically. When the mistress returns in her carriage from an evening outing, the maid imagines her undressing and going to bed naked. All night she longs for her, burning with desire. Like Diaz’s “From the Desire Field,” then, the poem presents the erotic desire of one woman for another.