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Three Poems  

Kimberly Burwick

Snow-wound, this means he has gone

Snow-wound, this means he has gone
beyond his past into the real names

for boyhood as though it were a condition
of storage in a world of drift, him

not yet brought down by the compost
of love—call the clouds we are cloudspotting

dolphin, narwhal, polar cub—

claim the curve of earth is coming
straight down if we forget to be grateful

White friction, snow more specific

White friction, snow more specific
than snow or blue icicles

bedimmed and direct—
I want everything to darling you

this way: the flutter of quail
beneath nightbirds, the blooming beds

of hoar-frost growing equally
from God and my own disturbed

dawn, I want you never stained
with aortic flood, I want and wait to want

Never my own branches—aspen, a fraction

Never my own branches—aspen, a fraction
of bright cage in the yard of limb-gold

roots, crude reach of etching sun
underslung by the slightest

idea of green—the boy is everything, is vivid
in place, embedded ghost of arm-wide turns

of earth, as it is lived, as we are lived, the great
good-hearted magnitude of geese coming

ever finer in the frozen signs of clouds
flushed and sudden and engaged in shroud