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    Everything We Always Knew Was True
    Everything We Always Knew Was True
    Everything We Always Knew Was True
    Ebook89 pages29 minutes

    Everything We Always Knew Was True

    By James Galvin

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    About this ebook

    "James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry."The Nation

    "Bleak and unsentimental but blessedly free of self-indulgence, these poems give the feeling of being absolutely essential."Library Journal

    "Galvin [has] the virtues of precise observation and original language . . . a rigor of mind and firmness of phrasing which make [each] poem an architectural pleasure."Harvard Review

    In his first collection in seven years, James Galvin expands upon his signature spare and gnomic lyric as he engages restrained astonishment, desire, and loss in a confessional voice. Whether considering masterpieces of painting or describing the austere landscape of his native Wyoming ranchlands, Galvin turns to highly imagistic yet intimate narratives to rain down compassion within isolation.

    From "On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses":

    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.

    James Galvin passionately depicts the rural American West and the interactions between humans and nature in his best-selling memoir The Meadow and his novel Fencing the Sky. Galvin is also the author of several volumes of poetry and teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He divides his time between Iowa and Wyoming.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateOct 13, 2016
    ISBN9781619321632
    Everything We Always Knew Was True
    Author

    James Galvin

    A beloved poet, celebrated nonfiction writer and novelist, James Galvin is the author of The Meadow. He teaches at the University of Iowa and divides his time between Iowa City and Tie Siding, Wyoming.

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      Book preview

      Everything We Always Knew Was True - James Galvin

      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

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