The Measure of the Year
By James Galvin
A canoe made of horse ribs tipped over in the pasture.
Prairie flowers took it for a meetinghouse.
They grow there with a vengeance.
Buck posts float across the flooded swamp
Where my father rode in and under.
Different horse.
He held her head up out of the mud
And said how he was sorry
Till they came to pull him out.
We found the white filly
On the only hard ground by the south gate.
He said she’d been a ghost from the start and he was right.
We covered her with branches.
There were things he had the wrong names for
Like rose crystals. Though
They were about what you’d think from a name like that.
He told us somewhere on Sand Creek Pass
Was a crystal that spelled our own initials
And we should try to find it.
We walked through sagebrush and sand currents, looking.
He said pasqueflowers and paintbrush
Wait till Easter to grow,
Then they come up even with snow still on the ground.
I thought I’d seen that happen.
Copyright Credit: James Galvin, “The Measure of the Year” from Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997. Copyright © 1997 by James Galvin. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Resurrection Update (Copper Canyon Press, 1997)