Everything We Always Knew Was True. James Galvin
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Natura Morta
—for Craig Arnold
I
I don’t mind one or two
Turkey buzzards spooling
Over my head in a famously
Heart-torn Western sky.
It doesn’t mean anything.
They’re just doing their job.
They aren’t complaining, either.
I don’t mind a dozen or so
Such birds cruising over a carcass
Like teenagers round a Dairy Queen.
They’re just out to get some.
That is all it means.
II
But at the BBQ
On Independence Day
2008,
When Craig played guitar,
And everybody sang,
When all we were doing was toasting
The dregs of our freedom, saying
Good-bye to our Constitution,
Hundreds of buzzards, maybe thousands,
Frenzy-flocked over Beth’s yard,
A black blizzard of rancid
Plumes—I don’t know what
It meant, but it meant something.
III
My lady draws flowers for hours and hours—
Pistils and stamens, stems and veins,
Paintbrush, wild iris, sage leaves and phlox—
Black ink shines from her pen
Or the finest available sable tip.
Sometimes she mixes feathers and flowers,
Birds and blossoms, transforming forms
Into swift fragile lines, colors and fragrances
Stroked into irrefutable black.
She captures motion with motion,
Stops it cold—irises dying,
Hummingbirds hovering, all
In breathtaking cuttlefish code.
She never draws buzzards so far as I know.
IV
Then I’m out fixing fence, tightening
And splicing the snow-broke wires.
I pull off the road into the sage and flowers,
And the fragrance under my tires explodes
Into the still summer air.
I think of her sketchbook that burgeons and blossoms
Into a black blizzard when she closes it.
Roadside Ditch Natura Morta
No one can draw fast enough
To capture the cut
Iris before its form falls
From its former self.
But when we passed a patch
In the ditch,
She told me to stop and she stepped
Down, opening her clasp
Knife. She spared one iris
With an impressionistic
Cocoon on its stem
And cut the flower beside it.
Once home
She rendered in a careful hurry.
She drew into the night as the iris died.
I woke grafted to her
In a vague, translucent hammock of dread.
A Thousand and One Avatars
It appeared like a bullet hole
In the day-lit stratosphere
That leaked a bright
White light.
Then it began
To approach us
Where we stood next
To the open palm
Of a lake.
It whirled to the north
And came down
Like a comet’s tail,
Then like a cloud of frost,
Slowly lofting,
A fuzzy galactic avatar.
Then we could tell it was birds,
Wings set, hovering
And flipping like pages
Of news in wind.
Then it was
White pelicans
With nine-foot wingspans,
And we saw the black-tipped
Remiges
Of the largest of boreal birds
Coming to rest
On our modest lake
In their ordained sortie
From Florida, the Gulf Coast,
And Panama,
To their home in British Columbia.
It was a pod,
Then a squadron,
Then a scoop,
As their wings became parachutes,
And they water-skied in.
There must have been a thousand of them,
Veering and banking
To avoid collisions.
Some luffed,
Waiting their turn.
It took an hour
For them all to come down
And fold their wings
And huddle in the middle
Like a melting ice floe.
They bore spikes for beaks,
And their necks hooked
Like shepherds’ crooks.
And then I thought
Of the blind man
I’d seen in the market
In a small village
In Italy,
Where this sort of thing can occur,
His open palm of bills,
All folded and tucked