James Galvin

Sulky what-ifs. Sulky what-ifs. They bumblefuck the metastuff. Diffidence their stock in trade. Cozy hell — cozy, hell. They make a mockery of irony. They hold Special Olympics in wit. What was Shakespeare’s blood pressure? Vertical river, cloister of thunder, Bleeds the ship’s fell sail. God comes in for a landing. He lowers God’s landing gear. He raises holy spoilers, lowers the sacred ailerons. He imagines Reality. Tried everything in life? Sulky what-ifs are dumbstruck. Drumsticks. Their spiritual actuality is empirical. What if uppity angels? What if there really were rules? What if those angels melted in the rain? If reality is an illusion, wouldn’t it stand to reason That illusions are real? A lot of dumb questions. Impingement of external objects or conditions upon the body Palpitate apostasy. The oppressed must free the oppressors to free themselves, see? The soul is euphemism for the body. What does willing mean? Do you sense my sense? Am I fashionable? Objective as an angel in the rain? Screaming from a safe place? Nine smocked doctors, three unmasked. One has left his face sewn to the pillow. One holds a lace fan like a hand of cards she studies, Considering the risks. She is the loveliest doctor. Her doctor-father scolds her right there in front of all the other doctors. They are aghast. They kneel and don carnival hats with feathers. I don’t think they are really doctors. The trees are real. They are green kachinas. Dark rooms of wind are installed in the house of barbarism. The norm is always incorrect. If what?

Without the manifest necessity of a paint-laden brush, the motion traced by the painter's hand would mimic that moth's fragile desperation against the glass as it seeks escape into the already painted sunset. It drops to the sill periodically the way the painter's hand would drop to the palette. Then it sputters back up erratically and zigzags to indicate the horizontal nature of sunsets. On the other side of the glass, free to the air, a nighthawk enacts the same erratic striving, up and up and down and sideways then up again and falteringly up until it drops, wings folded, suicidally earthward. It spreads its wings just above the ground for the life- saving aerialist's breathtaking swoop. Air through feathers (they call it drumming) hums like a wind harp or tissue paper on a comb. The nighthawk flies like that, erratic as a bat, because that's how moths fly, and that's what nighthawks eat and what they feed their fledglings. Nighthawks build no nests but lay their eggs on bare ground. Their camouflage is so perfect you can find them only by accident. If you are out walking and the mother flies up, pulling that clichéd broken-wing trick, and you mark the spot she rose from, you can find the eggs . If you go back after they hatch, you can look right at them and think they aren't there—just some small chunks of wood. So I'm watching this nighthawk and the moth on the glass in their painterly struggles that mirror each other as the sunset reclines, aloof. This is the only moth I've seen this rainless summer. The only nighthawk too. So I open the window and give them both what they want.

I woke from a bird hitting the window, almost, I thought, hard enough to break it. The sun rose knowingly. I slid the sash up and stuck my head out like someone in an Italian movie. A flicker lay on its back—stunned—but it was blinking steady as a railroad crossing. Was there misery to put out? Would it come to its "senses"? I thought where were you when bark beetles killed half my trees? Then I remembered, sleepily, reading that flickers mostly eat ants. I went back to sleep for half an hour, and dreamed, as I often do, of horses. When next I looked, the bird still lay still, still blinking. Maybe, I thought, it can't roll over. So I went down and rolled it over. Terrified by my touch, it came to life and flop- hopped down the hill into some sagebrush. It didn't fly, but it didn't seem broken, either. I tried to find it later. No luck. Whether it lived and flew off, or died thrust into a bush, was, apparently, none of my business. If it were thrust into a bush, I knew the ants wouldn't wait for the guest of honor to start dinner.

All the trees kept their own counsel without any wind to speak of, until one lone limber pine began gesticulating wildly, as if it suffered from its own inner cyclone. It was like a lunatic in the courtroom of other trees. We forgot about the sunset and the dark coming on across the plain. Then the reason appeared: a mother antelope had twin newborns backed into the tree and fended off a pair of coyotes who darted in and feinted out, knowing she couldn't defend them both. The girl I was with shrieked, "Do something!" I thought of the rifle back at the house. I thought of a litter of coyote whelps in a den somewhere nearby. I thought of the three-hundred-yard sprint to the tree. The mother antelope would be first to bolt, and those coyotes would have the aplomb to make off with both twins. I said no. The antelope struck out with her forelegs, she butted the coyotes back, until one of them got the chance they had orchestrated and caught a twin and trotted off, dangling it by the nape as gently as if it were her own.

for William Kittredge 1. That woman still lives at her ranch. You can ask her. Maybe She knows. As near and far As the rest of us can tell The barn and sheds were built In the Great Depression. Someone Had money and a big idea. Far and away the biggest Idea I’ve ever seen. Pat says there must’ve been A hundred men, shepherds And shearers, working there. It’s one of those things That not only is, but seems, Larger inside than out, Like a planetarium or an orange, Even with Wyoming around it, And real stars flying away. Just stick your head in there; Its dark will make you dizzy. It has an underneath Too low to stand in unless You are a sheep. The loft Vaults like a dusky church. 2. All that summer I balanced water, Coaxing the desert Into pasture, With eight cubic feet Per second for two Thousand acres. Horseback, shovel On my shoulder along Miles of ditches: Stalling here, Releasing there, Water over The deepening green, Keeping it living: Herons and cranes Regal in meadows, Strings of ducklings Frothing the ditch To get away. 3. One day riding ditches I saw Clay. He was on the hill against the sky, Flapping his arms at me. They were going to bulldoze the corrals at the shearing sheds, Intricate maze of gates and pens Clay, as a kid, had built with his father, Before they lost their ranch, before Frank died, Before the family had to move away. The new owner was razing everything. I guess he had some kind of idea. Clay didn’t need any gates, but, as Pat said, That’s Clay. I met them at the shearing sheds. Pat held a wrecking bar like a steel snake. I just can’t stand tearin’ apart all them guys’s dreams, he said, looking shy. Hell is when you know where you are. 4. On the barn roof a loose piece of tin Flaps in the wind like a broken wing. Wyoming whirls in the sun. Up in the loft a pair of shears, Oh, fifty or sixty years forgotten there, Floats in noonlight, bearing up some dust, Just a pair of spring-steel scissors, Two knives joined at the hip, with smiling edges. An owl the color of things left alone Flaps out of the gable door. Hell is when you know where you are: Mazes of pens and gates dreaming sheep; Miles of ditches dreaming green. 5. No one living knows Who built the shearing sheds, Unless maybe that woman, And I’m not about to ask her, Ever since she tried To stab her husband with a pair of scissors. He was ninety-one And barely held her off. Later she claimed she was just Trying to cut his heart Medication out of his shirt Pocket — dope, she called it — And the old man had to leave The ranch, where he didn’t last long. They bulldozed the corrals. We got forty gates. We took them someplace safe. 6. Now the vast, dim barn floats like an ocean liner Whose doldrums are meadows spinning into brush, And everywhere you look Wyoming hurries off. All night the stars make their escape. In the loft a pair of shears cuts woolly moonlight. All day a piece of roofing slaps in the wind. A startled owl flaps out of the gable. Hell is when you know where you are and it’s beautiful. You saved the gates for nothing. You balanced the water to keep the green from spinning Away into sage, the same gray as the wing That just now shaded your eyes.

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 narratives, songs of place, I’m thinking of the long cowboy ballads Ray taught me the beginnings of and would have taught me the ends if he could have remembered them. But remembering was years ago when Ray swamped for ranches at a dollar a day and found, and played guitar in a Saturday night band, and now he is dead and I’m remembering near the end when he just needed a drink before he could tie his shoes. We’d stay up all night playing the beginnings of songs like Falling Leaf, about a girl who died of grief, and Zebra Dun, about a horse that pawed the light out of the moon. Sometimes Ray would break through and recall a few more verses before he’d drop a line or scramble a rhyme or just go blank, and his workfat hands would drop the chords and fall away in disbelief. Between songs he’d pull on the rum or unleash coughing fits that sounded like nails in a paper bag. Done, he’d straighten and say,My cough’s not just right, I need another cigarette, and light the Parliament he bit at an upward angle like Roosevelt and play the start of another song. Then, played out and drunk enough to go home, he’d pick up his hat and case and make it, usually on the second try, through the front gate and gently list out into the early morning dark, beginning again some song without end, yodeling his vote under spangles.

Where I live      distance is the primal fact The world is mostly      far away and small Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind Engendering our only weather      dry Except in winter      pine trees live on snow So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads Like a prophecy      its snow before it Technology      a distant windy cause There is no philosophy      of death where I live Only philosophies      of suffering

To keep from ending The story does everything it can, Careful not to overvalue Perfection or undervalue Perfect chance, As I am careful not to do in telling. By now a lot has happened: Bridges under the water, No time outs, Sinewy voices from under the earth Braiding and going straight up In a faint line. I modify to simplify, Complicate to clarify. If you want to know your faults, marry. If you want to know your virtues, die. Then the heroine, Who resembles you in certain particulars, Precipitates the suicide Of the author, wretchedly obscure, Of that slim but turgid volume, By letting slip: Real events don't have endings, Only the stories about them do.

1. Even the pole bean tendrils sought out and gripped their frames within six hours of my setting them. One of the things that is breaking my heart is that I can’t trust language to express any thanks. My pole beans, my honeybees, my coyotes, my dog, all my good horses. 2. The black mare I shouldn’t have bought and bought, and once I had, should have shipped, bucked me, too, the first time I got up. But God she was a beauty. I thought if I just rode her I could ride her down. Her name was Sara and we kept it at that. All she wanted to do was run. Ears back, flat out, nose pushed into the next life. I wanted her to learn to walk. 3. After about a year of chop I turned her uphill on a good gravel road and said, “OK, you bitch, you want to run?” I let go her head and gave her the steel. I’d never been on a horse so fast. I’ve never been on one since. So fast you couldn’t count the beats in the rhythm of her gait. Suicidal. But when, after some miles, she started to flag, I said, “I thought you wanted to run,” and dug her out again. 4. The pole bean tendrils sought their frames within six hours of my setting them. They broke my heart. They gripped. 5. A patch of sunlight mottled the shade. Whether she never saw the root that snaked through the shadow or was just too far in front of herself, I’ll never know. She stumbled and fell. First on her knees then over. We rasped together down the gravel road, black mare on top of me. We rasped to a halt. She jumped to her feet. She stared at me. I could see the bone in both her knees. Ribbons of hide hanging. Blood like volunteer firemen beginning to rise to the occasion. 6. Ten years later, today, I’m riding her. I keep her reined in most of the time. She tosses her head, snaps tie-downs. She dances and whirls, doubles under and rears incessantly. She makes me the butt of ridicule: “So, uh, Jim, how old is that mare?” “She must be twenty now.” “Don’t you think it’s time she was broke?” Every once in a while I let her run and break my heart. Anyone watching stops breathing. 7. If I ever get to heaven and know who I am, I’d like to over- hear my daughter tell a story to her children. “Sometimes my dad used to ride this black mare...”

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.