Poetry | June 01, 2002
Poetry Feature: Brendan Galvin
Brendan Galvin
Featuring the poems:
- Brendan
- Riffing Deciduous
- Mystery Squid
- A Buck’s Prints in Winter
- Fogdog
- New Cop
Riffing Deciduous
Summer, old bore, though we love the ways
in a fall of soft tonnage, your stranglehold
from cranberry bog to hogback,
minium, not yellow but vitelline and those
in a nest like a straw handbag
precariously woven, the instinctive faith
the textures of fox sparrows will be
we’ll hear the groaning into being
the sound of a rubbed balloon
Mystery Squid
They say it lives miles down
in that wet obsidian
we crawled from, below
Martini’s Law, down where
things, if they can, create
their own light.
of its country is an accurate
reading of our own ignorance,
but in photographs that thing
looks like a blown-back
umbrella, handle and spokes,
fabric gone, until we
recall it’s twenty feet long,
the size of a tree uprooted and
drifting sidewise where
pressure of depth
has exacted stringency,
and its arms like ten sticky
branches trap prizes
yet to be named, blinks
and inklings, articulated wisps,
eclectic pulsings, a magpie
hoard where no magpie
can live, rhythms fleshed out,
tidbits on which this living
Giacometti thrives.
Where it moves with random
taillights toward memory’s
submarine canyons, our loneliness
is as much without meaning
as silence, our disbelief is only
the self-saving doubt of a fieldhand
witnessing a space shot: “That thing
ain’t going to no moon.”
A Buck’s Prints in Winter
Three weeks after deer season, and except for
an orange flare-up in the wood stove’s window,
the hoard of protective coloring is gone,
even that hunter’s gone who waited with
Death’s patience in leaf fall
and shadow of Gore-Tex on Bald Hill
over there, arrow notched, his miracle fiber bow
engineered to drive a steel tip through cement.
Another human season survived, and this buck’s track
is stamped like three-inch broken hearts
in roadside sand again. He has run coyote gauntlets
from the high pines all the way down to the river,
though nightly now that pack
petitions the hunter Orion with faltering cries
I picture flattening out like wood smoke on the air.
But the murder on my mind’s another
Sunday-night movie plot: sex, sad choices,
and money, that left a toddler
crawling a bloody floor and brought
the media ponies to town,
flexing their famous hair and backing us
to the wall with microphones, getting it all wrong
until the body and the story cooled,
all of it irreconcilable with that buck I’ve watched
drinking in the river, tutelary spirit
of a rain-fogged afternoon, and startled
sweeping downhill as I went to the woodpile,
antlered ghost crashing through brittle reeds,
cattails he burst in passing out of sight
the puffs I thought were gun smoke.
Fogdog
Barely a light at all,
and seemingly without source,
a fogdog comes one or none to a fog bank,
not a small deposit
the sun makes, but otherworldly pale
as a candle held aloft in a house
they floated across this bay
from Long Point or Billingsgate
two centuries ago, as if where droplets
and damps are working on shingles
and fascia boards in these
soft November days
someone were searching yet.
I could say this place
has been storied into meaning
by its humans, but these phenomena
are not metaphors: there’s a twisted
delta-class magnetic field
above sunspot 9715
that’s going to cause explosions
up there, and send gusts of solar wind
toward us around the first of next week.
A fogdog this morning
where the river at full moon
invades the flats back of Egg Island,
and a few days after the Leonid meteor storm
briefly connected all the dots,
a black cloud drove a rainbow before it
as I came to the top of Tom’s Hill–
that moving spectrum another first
in my weather annals.
Things out here on the edge
are traveling with their mysteries again.
Yesterday while I worried these events
the wind unleashed an answer
miles away down the beach and sent it
leaping like a tumbleweed over
washed-up obstacles
to come wicketing past me
as a plastic bucket,
a cracked yellow human construct
churning out groans as it went.
New Cop
He is waxed and polished, as streamlined
from crewcut to steel toes
as this new cruiser my taxes bought him.
If he’s Before, then I’m After,
creased and spindled in all the wrong places,
what he could become,
though I doubt he can imagine
letting his shirttail hang out like this
to indicate it’s one of his better days,
or growing a white beard until
it turns flyaway and his wife-cut hair
freaks whitely from an Orioles cap
as if at the first
tingle from Old Sparky.
Should I excuse myself by telling him
how I have to exercise this left hip joint,
or say I’ve been jogging
and walking this road right here for
a third of a century, so have a claim on it?
Who is this kid, anyway? Nobody
I’ve ever seen in this town of 1,500.
It’s suddenly damp and foggy,
and I’m feeling muskrat shaggy
and a little bagged off, like I just crawled
out of that marsh down there.
Are you a Baltimore fan? he asks.
No, I’m an oriole fan, I say,
the wrong answer because I can see
it’s scrambling his gestalt.
Not a good day for a walk, he says,
watching the eyes behind my bifocals
for the Vacancy sign, waiting
for me to ask when the Pope’s
going to get here with my tuna sandwich.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Poetry
Jan 08 2024
3 Poems by Scott Frey
Pink Feather Boa She is pinching my son’s small thumb and index finger around the petals of a buttercup, chanting She loves me; she loves me not,… read more
Poetry
Jan 08 2024
5 Poems by Virginia Konchan
Apostrophe My husband didn’t understand prayer. He said people who pray are deranged. Who do they think they’re talking to? Even with Bluetooth technology, do they not know how ridiculous… read more
Poetry
Jan 08 2024
5 Poems by Christine Marshall
Fall My father put his head through a wall. Leaves fell in red and orange puddles, the house dropped on the market. After-school sunlight dwindled, the solstice loomed. My child… read more