James Galvin

A pinup of Rita Hayworth was taped
To the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom.
Hares are wishes, especially dark ones.
...

Somewhere between a bird's nest and a solar system - whom did
the story use to fashion the crown of thorns, and did it prick
them?
Whom did the story use for judgement?
...

Past
fences the first sheepmen cast across the land, processions
of cringing pitch or cedar posts pulling into the vanishing
point like fretboards carrying barbed melodies, windharp
...

I knew the end would be gone before I got there.
After all, all rainbows lie for a living.
And as you have insisted, repeatedly,
The difference between death and the Eternal
...

We don't belong to each other.
We belong together.
Some poems
belong together to prove the intentionality of subatomic particles.
...

All those poems I wrote
About living in the sky
Were wrong. I live on a leaf
...

Remember the night you got drunk
and shot the roses?
You were a perfect stranger, Father,
even my bad sister cried.
...

I

A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house.

Two stories, seven rooms in all.
...

Well aren't you the harsh necessity,
As in what fear is for?
It was the summer of
You should have been there,
...

Salt is pity, brooms are fury,
The waterclock stands for primordial harmony.

The spruce forest, which is said to be
...

All the angels of Tie Siding were on fire.
The famous sky was gone.

Presumably the mountains were still there, invisible in haze.
OK,
...

Very sad,
Having to
Come out of nowhere,
...

The more I see of people, the more I like my dog.
And this would be good country if a man could eat scenery.

The lake's ice gives light back to the air,
...

Some little splinter
Of shadow purls
And weals down
The slewed stone
Chapel steps,
...

My grandfather was always sad. Sadly, as a boy, he paddled his canoe along the beautiful Hudson River, which was only then beginning to die. During the first war he was very sad in France because he knew he was having the time of his life. When it was over everyone in American felt like a hero — imagine.
...

A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture.
Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse.
They grow there with a vengeance.
...

We remember so little,
We are certain of nothing.
We long to perish into the absolute.
Where is a mountain
To spread its snowfields for us like a shawl?
...

On starless, windless nights like this
I imagine
I can hear the wedding dresses
Weeping in their closets,
Luminescent with hopeless longing,
...

No one can draw fast enough
To capture the cut
Iris before its form falls
From its former self.
...

To keep from ending
The story does everything it can,
Careful not to overvalue
Perfection or undervalue
...