On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live

By James Galvin

All those poems I wrote

About living in the sky

Were wrong. I live on a leaf

Of a fern of frost growing

Up your bedroom window

In forty below.

I live on a needle of a branch

Of a cedar tree, hard-bitten,

Striving in six directions,

Rooted in rock, a cedar

Tree made of other trees,

Not cedar but fir,

Lodgepole, and blue spruce,

Metastasizing like

Bacteria to the fan-

Lip of a draw to draw

Water as soon as it slips

From the snowdrift’s grip

And flows downward from

Branch to root — a tree

Running in reverse.

Or I live on a thorn on a trellis —

Trained, restrained, maybe

Cut back, to hold up

Those flowers I’ve only heard of

To whatever there is and isn’t

Above.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2013)