Out here you can say anything

You won’t notice until you see
the agate alien eyes
of bighorn ewes clustered
on a highway shoulder and you think,
not of their wildness, but of the way
their faces look like your mother
and her sisters standing together
against the tired unknown of a
farmhouse kitchen. Eventually, your heart
will feel flat as an alpine lake
you skip grief across to watch
it sink, nameless. You drove the ocean
of Wyoming while lightning
raked its fingers through the night
the way you will pull long bright
hairs off your mother’s sweater,
the way a guitar string will snap
and flash mid-song. You will wish
you could remember how to cry, standing
in the glassy plain outside Gunnison
where it is four degrees and everything
living is crusted with rime
and the sky is white and the ground
is white and the air is white and you rise
up from the asphalt as if born
to the darkness of it alongside
the ravens picking at an elk cow,
her shoulder sloping broken as the
mountains who sat up tall in the dawn
and scooched closer like your mother
leaning into you at the funeral and when
you speak the names of fathers
out loud, a murmuration of swallows
passes over you with the sound
of tearing paper, diamond bellies
shining white, conjured from the air
like snow, like breath.