Depending on the Wind

By James Galvin b. 1951 James Galvin

A score of years ago I felled a hundred pines to build a house.

Two stories, seven rooms in all.

I built my love a home.

Our

daughter was in orbit in the womb.

Mountains spun off like the arm

of a galaxy into the emptiness our windows framed.

"What a

view!" our friends exclaimed, and "Sunsets to die for every single night!"

Vertigo of solitude, distillate of loneliness for blood, my wife

untrue, my daughter flown, I, like a widower or worse, move

among the rooms I made.

Where once I was not alone, now each

closed door is panic, and spaces grow immense with memory, like

shadows at dusk.

Gone that arrangement of allegiances called family

we never really know before it ends.

Like love itself, it isn't true till

then.

I have no family now but remembrences of tiny joys, tinier

dramas we used to call our life, like pollen over everything: brightly

colored clothespins on the line, a cross-shaped coral earring whose

match is lost, books of fairy tales we read aloud at night.

I must be

dumb as a gunnysack of hammers.

Wind still blows through open

windows like it always used to do.

What did I love that made me

believe it would last?

James Galvin, "Depending on the Wind" from X Poems. Copyright © 2003 by James Galvin. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: X poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)

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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