The Common Field
BY ALEXANDRA TEAGUE
The common field is the seat of barbarism;
the separate farm, the door to civilization.
-Congressional Debate on the American Indian, 1859
My surname means dweller in the common field,
Irish but true: the family farm growing little
but eleven children in a single room: who fed them
how I don’t know: that clapboard box
still standing outside my grandfather’s house
he built himself: cheap paneling, trowel
from the Masons: secrets he’d never tell us:
gold plating that wasn’t even gold:
Texas inside and out: the one state proud enough
to sing itself possessive: the Rio Grande
dividing past and here: here where we were
lucky, could buy land and seeds, barbed wire
to hem a horse named Velvet, so shy or
nonexistent I never saw her: who would claim
a horse they didn’t have: a family whose name
(a man later tells me) equates with “nigger,”
“low-life” back in Ireland, though no one uses it
to mean that here: just hard to spell,
like league, with a T: everyone stumbling, asking
me to repeat, wanting it to end maybe agua,
something drinkable: first-world problems: land
that was ours in poverty and wealth,
sickness and no vows broken: not like the Indians
(a fraction on our other side): corn silking
half-baked sky in territories too far off the rails
for anyone to buy what someone said
they had to grow: the labor is not, admittedly, always
valuable, and yet it redeems the Indian, who laboring
learns to labor for himself: who was not trusted
with money because he’d waste it like the rain
and sun will waste the snow: nothing anyone ever
said of us, or not in public notes or policy
(my drunken uncles drunk losing jobs but
never the word civilized): to break down prejudices
of the untamed savage is a work of no ordinary labor: labor
laboring to make itself into something
more than duty, more than hammer
on two-by-four: destiny bright and shape-
shifting as the lava lamp by the TV, oil and wax
rising like some holy ascension, my grandfather
in the patched recliner watching Westerns:
true we have taken his land, or the land on which
he roamed, but he did nothing to improve it: someone
in my family came here first—after the first someone
came from Ireland to Tennessee to Texas,
built a one-room house, turned up the dry red dirt
the dog was named for—Red because he rolled
around our God-given land: it may be said
the very foundation of civilization commences with the plow.
