This is Michael Carey for Voices from the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary tradition. Today’s poem is "Real Wonder" by James Galvin of Iowa City. In it one can feel, as the title suggests "real wonder" wonder at being alive, wonder at the change of seasons, at all of God’s creation growing, changing, dying, even at the transient nature of life as we know it, awe and wonder even at the unknown life to come. It is a "wonder-ful" poem, in the truest sense of that word, a poem full of wonder and a joy to read.
In the stunned little interval
Between winter and spring.
Like the held gasp of surprise
Preceding real wonder,
I’m a flashlight in daylight.
Green stirs low down and shows
Through dead blond shocks of grass,
And gray aspen flowers dangle
Above old snowbanks:
I go around like a feral saint.
The timber hordes
It’s meager crust of snow.
I used to walk over the hill
To visit my neighbor
About now.
Just because he was still alive
After another winter.
We’d look out the window
At the groggy meadow,
Not much to say in the end.
This year my neighbor is dead
So I walk the hill anyway.
There’s his dead house.
There’s his dead fence.
The timber hordes
Its meager crust of snow.
I’m a gunnysack of gravel.
I’m sudden as a gust of light.
This is just
the stunned little interval
After another winter
The held gasp of surprise
Preceding real wonder.
"Real Wonder", by James Galvin from Lethal Frequencies published by Copper Canyon Press and reprinted in Voices on the Landscape: Contemporary Iowa Poets published by Loess Hills Books of Farragut.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all round you.
Biography
James Galvin was born in Chicago in 1951 and raised in northern Colorado. He earned a B.A. from Antioch College in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has published several collections of poetry, most recently Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997 (Copper Canyon, 1997), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Lethal Frequencies (1995); Elements (1988); God's Mistress (1984), which was selected for the National Poetry Series by Marvin Bell; and Imaginary Timber (1980). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book, The Meadow (1992) and a novel, Fencing the Sky Henry Holt, 1999). His honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. James Galvin lives in Laramie, Wyoming, where he has worked as a rancher part of each year all his life, and in Iowa City, where he is a member of the permanent faculty of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.