James Galvin

for John Grant My father-in-law writes from Umbria (where peasants eat songbirds for lunch and pray beneath frescoes by Giotto): Saturday, 30 Jan. (last day of the season wherein big men can kill little birds). Lyndon Johnson, while being escorted by a young Marine who said, “That one over there is your helicopter, Sir,” replied, placing his arm around the boy, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.” Sam said, “I might be white bread, but there is one pissed-off nigger in my heart.” McPherson says he doesn’t see anything in the world worth coming back for. He wants to get off the wheel, says, “I don’t want to come back as anything — not even a bumblebee.” So I say, “Oh, Jim, you’d make a good bumblebee,” but I was thinking: That should be enough for anybody’s God. It would be trite to describe the clocksmith’s house — the way it sounded like bees in there. “You can never have enough clocks in your house.” This from a man who had thousands in his. I asked, “You probably don’t even hear them anymore.” He said, “I hear them when they stop.” Lyle said, “It’s all right to be a fool; it’s just not all right to be a old fool.” Steve, the banjo wasn’t all they smashed. It was every window. It was every thing I had. You don’t want to feel the wind blow through your house that way. Another friend said, “I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.”

On starless, windless nights like this I imagine I can hear the wedding dresses Weeping in their closets, Luminescent with hopeless longing, Like hollow angels. They know they will never be worn again. Who wants them now, After their one heroic day in the limelight? Yet they glow with desire In the darkness of closets. A few lucky wedding dresses Get worn by daughters—just once more, Then back to the closet. Most turn yellow over time, Yellow from praying For the moths to come And carry them into the sky. Where is your mother's wedding dress, What closet? Where is your grandmother's wedding dress? What, gone? Eventually they all disappear, Who knows where. Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it. I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill. But what sad story brought it there, And what sad story will take it away? Somewhere a closet is waiting for it. The luckiest wedding dresses Are those of wives Betrayed by their husbands A week after the wedding. They are flung outside the double-wide, Or the condo in Telluride, And doused with gasoline. They ride the candolescent flames, Just smoke now, Into a sky full of congratulations.

All those poems I wrote About living in the sky Were wrong. I live on a leaf Of   a fern of   frost growing Up your bedroom window In forty below. I live on a needle of   a branch Of   a cedar tree, hard-bitten, Striving in six directions, Rooted in rock, a cedar Tree made of other trees, Not cedar but fir, Lodgepole, and blue spruce, Metastasizing like Bacteria to the fan- Lip of a draw to draw Water as soon as it slips From the snowdrift’s grip And flows downward from Branch to root — a tree Running in reverse. Or I live on a thorn on a trellis — Trained, restrained, maybe Cut back, to hold up Those flowers I’ve only heard of To whatever there is and isn’t Above.

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? You might begin, The men who come to see me are not exactly lovers. Or,Seen at a distance the gazelle is blue. That’s just your way of cheering me up. You might begin, The quality of the telegram is vulnerable. Or even,The spirit of the telegram is virginal. By now I am ravenous. You might begin, Nothing’s more passionate than a train, Entering an enormous depot, Empty except for two lovers, irreconcilable, Parting.

A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture. Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse. They grow there with a vengeance. Buck posts float across the flooded swamp Where my father rode in and under. Different horse. He held her head up out of the mud And said how he was sorry Till they came to pull him out. We found the white filly On the only hard ground by the south gate. He said she’d been a ghost from the start and he was right. We covered her with branches. There were things he had the wrong names for Like rose crystals. Though They were about what you’d think from a name like that. He told us somewhere on Sand Creek Pass Was a crystal that spelled our own initials And we should try to find it. We walked through sagebrush and sand currents, looking. He said pasqueflowers and paintbrush Wait till Easter to grow, Then they come up even with snow still on the ground. I thought I’d seen that happen.

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. Once a year on Armistice Day, he met with all his friends from the war. They got drunk and recounted the stories of the time when they had thought they were men and the world had seemed entirely possible. They placed empty chairs for certain of the dead, and in the center of the table, a bottle of cognac from France, for the last man of them to drink alone, in honor of the others. Year after year they gathered to watch each other and themselves disappear, turn into empty chairs. Sooner or later they were all sad. Some of them must have realized they didn’t need to join a club for this. Finally it came down to my grandfather and a man named Oscar Cooper. Neither of them wanted to outlive anyone. They couldn’t remember what honor was. When they drank the cognac it didn’t taste like anything. They threw the bottle in the river as if they thought it meant that neither of them was alive anymore. When Cooper died the following year, my grandfather took his rifle out into the yard and fired three shots at the sky. Then he went down to the river and drank himself to sleep. After that he was never sad, not even when the river died.

Some little splinter Of shadow purls And weals down The slewed stone Chapel steps, Slinks along The riverrock wall And disappears Into the light. Now ropy, riffled, Now owlish, sere, It smolders back To sight beneath A dwarfish, brindled tree That chimes and sifts And resurrects In something’s sweet And lethal breath. This little shadow Seems to know (How can it know? How can it not?) Just when to flinch Just where to loop and sag And skitter down, Just what to squirrel And what to squander till The light it lacks Bleeds it back And finds My sleeping dark-haired girl — O personal, Impersonal, Continual thrall — And hammocks blue In the hollows of her eyes.

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

Very sad, Having to Come out of nowhere, The rain We’ve been waiting for Is waiting too. Trees, By now, Have had enough daylight. They’d like, Please, To sleep it off. If nothing Else, nothing Else. Behind our backs Things mean themselves. Violins crack From wanting to exist. It’s hard, getting a word in. I’m waiting To arrive inside my clothes, If nothing else, Willing To be (having to Come out of nowhere) Very sad.

All the angels of Tie Siding were on fire. The famous sky was gone. Presumably the mountains were still there, invisible in haze. OK, there was only one angel, but she was a torch in the wind, beside the wind-ripped American flag the post office flies. OK, she wasn't literally on fire. Maybe her angelic red hair made me think she was ablaze as it flaunted the prairie and made a festival of itself. There was a fireworks stand nearby, entirely beside the point, as was the Fourth of July. It was really dry. It was fire season. It was the wind festival, featuring an angel standing in it, letting her red hair conflagrate history, reduce it to ash, bid it start anew, erase the sky with atrocity's own smoke. She wore, besides her flame of hair, blue jeans and a singlet. She was violent in the wind. I started walking toward her. I'm still walking toward her, no idea what to say when I get there.