Two
poems from Kimberly Burwick's The Norway Tree
followed
by a note on the author
Everything
Lush I Know
I
do not know the names of things,
but I have lived on figs and grapes,
smell
of dirt under moon
and moon under threat of rain,
everything lush I know
an
orchard becoming all orchards,
flowers here and here
every earth I have
left,
every brief home-making,
the lot of God blooming vines
right now,
then, and always.
Desire
to Collapse
Light breaks this county in fours
as if the hold I have I have not.
Juniper
as hell but harder,
mountain not high
but
darkened to green,
the surrogate surrender I cannot.
That countryside was
more calculus
than lowland, more a tour of continuity
gone
wrong, gull or kestrel, the first year females
ordinary as nothing. When the
limit lies elsewhere
in the contact-calls of the chicadee
or the kitter
in a few acres of wheat,
language
makes a foreign sound
muffled by distance, harvest and tree.
I make threshold
out of grasses
so the breaking is more a bending,
I
touch rabbits midtwitch to know the motion
of the instant as pronghorn know
sighting.
Dusty roots and the law of falling bodies
appear suddenly as flesh
without path.
©
Kimberly
Burwick obtained her B.A in literature from the University of Wisconsin –
Madison, and her M.F.A. in poetry from Antioch University- Los Angeles. Her poems
have appeared in the Indiana Review, the Literary Review, Fence,
Conjunctions and other journals. Burwick's first book of poems Has No
Kinsmen was published by Red Hen Press in 2006. She currently teaches at the
University of Connecticut, and lives in northwestern Massachusetts.
