Brendan Galvin has published 21 books and chapbooks of poetry. He graduated from Boston College in 1960 with a B.S. degree in the natural sciences, and received his MFA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts. One work, Atlantic Flyway (1980) was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (2005) was a National Book Award finalist.
Many of Galvin’s poems reflect his interest and background in the nature and the natural sciences. “Pollen” was first published in Great Blue: New and Selected Poems in 1990 and included in Habitat in 2005.
“Pollen”
As when a breeze
slips off the water
and crosses a headland,
and even those limp zeroes
wavelets make, fragile as
smoke rings, erase themselves
from the viscid surface,
and sails slacken,
so the air
this afternoon slackens,
and the page blurs
under your eyes
as the massive invisible
orgy of flower
quickening flower
sifts through the atmosphere,
drifts at its peak,
rose to rose,
and from the roadside locust trees
birds stagger, drunk,
daring tires, kneeling in the grass.
Insistent as midges, grains
tease at your nostrils,
and you cry onto the page
for no human reason.
And if somewhere
a boy’s arm breaks the chains
of this lassitude
long enough
to toss a stone at a squirrel,
that pine exploding into gold
tilts you toward sleep
lightly. You whisper
how wings and the shadows of
wings circle you,
surrounding the years.
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Maureen Doallas says
Lovely selection. To take as a subject something like pollen and make of it this kind of poem underscores the poet’s remarkable talent.