James Galvin Poems

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.
...

Sulky what-ifs.
Sulky what-ifs.
They bumblefuck the metastuff.
Diffidence their stock in trade
...

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,
...

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.
...