Variations on a Trance

Robins in the cottonwoods, holding still as the thin snow comes. The sun seems to flood them with blood. They have settled in the empty branches while the storm-lamps spit in your limbs, red evening swinging across the sky then dropping, ragged, into your frame to stay with you as you move and smile and have opinions. Then a woman’s torso white with dawn— their rich perch is yours, there is nothing you need to expect or retrieve, like warm fields floating toward an invisible moon. A person learns stone-throated composures and barters for days of calm weather, like a man in a dream who understands the answering pressure of eyes—you ask too much. But the birds are not reckless. Every minute their fat shapes are filling with sun, and I apprentice myself to their candor. Their bodies drift on the moving branches, solid— they are not taking and keeping. They are not torn papers in a rumor of wind, their small backs brown fields holding thunderclouds up. Inside their bodies, nothing falls to the earth and dies.