Matthew Burns
The Sharp Air
The river I don’t know
rumples over its rocks
and carries anything
that falls in—silt and brush,
a tumbleweed blown
from ten miles away.
The river, clear and silent.
When I crouch at its trembling lip
or pitch the rare flat stone across its skin,
I am looking for something
to carry me, not away but up.
Like the chickadee’s call to its mate
that goes bay-bee and bay-bee
until she calls back with same
and they go on beside the river
so the water carries this, too, away;
so that it unwinds and eddies,
like the silt of missing,
into the air; the sharp air,
carrying everything it can hold.
Matthew Burns teaches writing and literature in upstate New York and is currently a poetry editor at Heron Tree. His poem “Rhubarb” won a James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review; other poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and have appeared or are forthcoming in Posit, ellipsis…, The Raleigh Review, Camas, Spoon River Poetry Review, anderbo, Quiddity, Heron Tree, LimeHawk, and others.
The Sharp Air
The river I don’t know
rumples over its rocks
and carries anything
that falls in—silt and brush,
a tumbleweed blown
from ten miles away.
The river, clear and silent.
When I crouch at its trembling lip
or pitch the rare flat stone across its skin,
I am looking for something
to carry me, not away but up.
Like the chickadee’s call to its mate
that goes bay-bee and bay-bee
until she calls back with same
and they go on beside the river
so the water carries this, too, away;
so that it unwinds and eddies,
like the silt of missing,
into the air; the sharp air,
carrying everything it can hold.
Matthew Burns teaches writing and literature in upstate New York and is currently a poetry editor at Heron Tree. His poem “Rhubarb” won a James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review; other poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and have appeared or are forthcoming in Posit, ellipsis…, The Raleigh Review, Camas, Spoon River Poetry Review, anderbo, Quiddity, Heron Tree, LimeHawk, and others.