I Looked for Life and Did a Shadow See

Some little splinter

Of shadow purls

And weals down

The slewed stone

Chapel steps,

Slinks along

The riverrock wall

And disappears

Into the light.

Now ropy, riffled,

Now owlish, sere,

It smolders back

To sight beneath

A dwarfish, brindled tree

That chimes and sifts

And resurrects

In something’s sweet

And lethal breath.

This little shadow

Seems to know

(How can it know?

How can it not?)

Just when to flinch

Just where to loop and sag

And skitter down,

Just what to squirrel

And what to squander till

The light it lacks

Bleeds it back

And finds

My sleeping dark-haired girl —

O personal,

Impersonal,

Continual thrall —

And hammocks blue

In the hollows of her eyes.

Copyright Credit: James Galvin, “I Looked for Life and Did a Shadow See” 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)