Kimberly Burwick

Glory all the way to the trees, white lilacs
on the cut grass, then nothing but the setting
flatness of short grains upon drifts of weeds.
I waste what stillness turns the decaying robins
bright, dreading the uncertain length
of your brotherly life. So that I carry
home nothing of you, I think only of sun
letting go of the terribly red ditches.

In the small hurricane the nests hold
in gilded branches, as milkweed is sometimes
caught in the suspended darker drafts.
Inside, you are making fun of moonlight,
sex with the teenage Catholic, anything to give
yourself the language of a miscarried psalm.
I hear you in the dwindling clouds, silver
with a large unwashed face.

It happens in the talus when the sun firm
but far off spreads from lake water,
as if you sent two first lights, filling the
whole arc like Dickinson's burning robin
she named the red pilgrim almost grown
from dawn itself. I need to tell you
what passes between mountains,
in the yellow stints they call frostweed.

You see it only when the horses are in motion,
the blur of canter and lupine, muscle
and prairie rock, running the weeds
in a condition of quiet that is thunder
tender on the dirt and thistle.
You, in the bird-weeks of April
like a rain-born weeping for the lost
and cooling places we roam just before moon.

How does the snow stay on
in us from the first blizzard,
the one acre of seminary
light almost gray
in its proffered gloss—
Let pass the voice of one
God only while we are young
and almond with the grace
of those we want gone.