Brother
Empty yourself in the foamflower,
calla, the crushed chicory.
Greenflies nest in the blasted
bird, some blue-wing roadside
rots in the scrub beardtongue,
the hot air upon us to bear as is.
Some lay on warm ryegrass in
the last residue of cloud.
The geese go on being geese
silken in slashes of weather
whether we hammer them
to our wooden homes or not.
Tell us how this ends. In the throat,
the cloves, or in the dove coming
out of herself in the wayside seeds?
I Struggle With Your Breath
I see it only when horses are
in motion, the blur canter
and lupine, muscle and prairie rock,
running the weeds in a condition of
quiet that is thunder tender
on dirt and thistle, on the bird-weeks
of April like a rain-born weeping
for the lost and cooling places I
roam just before moon.
Christ, the lambs are yellow
and the goats are rag paper. When I
watched you breathe on the virgin teen,
herons tried to feed their way
back to someone's normal soul.
And No Thief Approacheth And No Moth Corrupteth
The earth is through the lamb-farm
where sun bloods the apples,
where ticks in silence rest in the soak of backwater.
In the dream of your execution, I do
my violence with a green handkerchief,
bird shit on lavender, and the moon rises bald
and clean into the ditch. I hear the mental process
of silos simmer and the Pentecostal winds.
This house marked with snowberries and dust.
The great price of bringing forth wheat.
Thou Art Lightning And Love
To the feast of errors
I give larch
that never bloom,
silk fishes of milkweed,
confusion of the divided seasons,
thorns in a pale nest blown
into pinecones.
Out of haying comes
the living light
as thistles, all who hate
you joined to you,
walking upright with
the strength of clean pine.
________________________
KIMBERLY BURWICK
Good Night Brother
Burnside Review Books, 2014
