My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field

Supritha Rajan

It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him

in history, the one that counts
the progress of time as seismic

shifts, as the partitioning of before
and after, as if history unfurls

a taut chain that surveys the distance
from one point on the landscape

to the boundary of another
while everything else falls to the side

like small pebbles along a rock-face
bound to nothing but the abyss

of unrecorded intimacies, dark and spacious
as those tunnels the imagination builds

from pools of ink. My father leans
over a page, his brown hand

bound to the binding of a book
and the book a white fog from which

steps forth a man wandering alone
along a country path and walking, walking

all day long the endless length of a field
in search of what the resistance of a wind alone

could teach him—the type of man who,
possessed by vagrant passions, becomes the man

he reads about in a book, and so is also
my father standing up from a twin cot

in a small room with an even smaller suitcase
and wandering into a field he walks all day long

against a wind that smells of the Welsh sea
until weak-kneed and parched with thirst

he stops for water in a churchyard.
This is before I am a point of view

in history, before he becomes a household
bound, like any man, to that war between

self-clouding sorrow and vague ambition.
It is the month of Chaitra. The beginning

of a new year. Everywhere in the field
fluttering around him, nameless as the impulse

that first led him here, the bright and strange
crowd of yellow flowers called daffodils.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Supritha Rajan‘s “My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Invitatory

Dawn again and the birds of oblivion sing
of all hungers

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Photo of Supritha Rajan

Supritha Rajan is presently an associate professor of English at the University of Rochester. Her most recent poems have been published in such journals as Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, New American Writing, and elsewhere.

Cover of the Three Penny Review Winter 2024

Winter 2024

Berkeley, California

Editor and Publisher
Wendy Lesser

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