Snowstorm with Lament

I am alive strained pine boughs
locked in drifts my daughter’s
girlhood friend is dead

I wander all day one window to next
glisten and harbor snow folds its batting
Why now remember how the magpie

grieved its mate splayed on dirt
whipped its wing tips against beating
love into screamed its grating cry

Trill and chatter replaced by
fury How dare you shrills the widow
pecking pebbles as if to raise his breast

How can this loss be mine?
She bursts into nervous flight
inches above the body

Surely his beak will open hungry
surely another season to migrate and settle
a brood cloudless pivot & singing

but only a thin wind lifts the dead’s feathers
only gravel and dust shift beneath

She leaves and returns with grasses
makes of her forage a bolster
twigs and dry weeds—

a grief wreath
a litter to slip under him as if
she might drag him to a better place

and through it all
the terrible shrieking plea