Three Sonnets

By James Galvin b. 1951 James Galvin

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

Source: Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997)

Biography

James Galvin is the author of several collections of poetry, including Resurrection Update: Collected Poems, 1975–1997 and X (2003); a novel, Fencing the Sky (1999); and The Meadow (1992), a prose meditation on the landscape of the Wyoming-Colorado border and the people who live there.

Galvin’s work is infused with the genuine realities of the western landscape, while at the same time not shirking difficult questions of faith, . . .

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