Читать книгу Everything We Always Knew Was True - James Galvin - Страница 5

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.