Summer 2004
	Stephen Burt
	BIFROST
	Not mine, but somebody’s Heaven: November air distilled, a half-moon          before the liberal arts,
	& laughter through the quad, and cloudlessness without a verb; no thing          more urgent than a shouted recipe,
	this visible world a pause a rise of one degree.          A tan cat settles comfortably
	on cement; ungrateful diamond-angled sun casts its patterns of vacuums against a flat roof.          How finely weighted in my favor
	most of our contests in this life have been. The last red trees are opals, are from Mars,          whose light takes twenty minutes to arrive
	& then gets lost; leaves fly and crowd above the soccer players’ shins, rich brittle grass          as high as it will be
	this year or next, & free on every path, slow, unassuming          shadows dig in, to shut the long gate of the day.