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 muchabout them. I know they are not dead.I know they are asleep because one of them has moved, just enoughto show it is a movement you make in sleep, an adjustmentof resting weight. I don’t know if it is romanticthat 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 wherethey have flattened it. Have they been here the full lengthof 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 of a labor I know nothing about.There are birds singing to the dawn. There is the soundof a big wheel rolling somewhere. There are trees,as tall as parents, but they have not slept under them.In the dark, alone, I went out to see the turn towards morning.Then I saw them. What the imagination would do with two peoplesleeping in a field is keep them where they are,unknowable, untouched. The imagination also wants themto stir, to wake them back into their stories.The day will be hot. The smell of yesterday’s heatis still in the air, like the sweat of a body. What would bring meto a field in the night and have me sleep there?Whose hand would I be holding, out of desire or fear?My pants’ hems are heavy with dew. I know how far awayI am from everyone. Am I a child again, am I old?Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the bodyfrom one end of time to another.