A man who giggles like a luckless spigot Has come to our streets from the war.
He has a cup that gathers air That he drinks, for a man must drink
And comb his hair who has been to war. Sometimes the cup holds a plastic flag
That someone has offered as a joke. He chews on the flag, for he still has teeth,
Though they ache with the thought of guns For teeth can think who have been to war.
We pass and we nod, hands jammed in pockets That have nothing in them that the man can use
Who has a brain that repeats and repeats What he did, what his fingers did, what his eyes
Had to see, what he heard, what he smelled Who remembered hay and chalk and a rosy girl.
He makes our children laugh at his giggles. They think maybe he is a clown, escaped.
They think a swallow should come to live with him, Teach him again how to sing, how to fly,
So he could take his giggles from our streets And hide them high in a flowering chestnut tree.
TRAPEZE ARTIST
for Emily Dickinson
The daring girl on the flying trapeze who touches in her derring-do and sheered momentum either stand and stays for none, not the sweet sanity of the platform
which edges on the sky nor yet the unsubstantial rope that's ground enough for most of us, suspended as it is in a guy of clever weft and warp. Here's compendium:
Willing everything each time, she swings out to cap- tivate by death-provoking arcs and spins mere OOOh--ing us
who every time hold on at last to nothing but our seats and then on the backward swing reach for the bar and sometimes on the downward rush exult at nothing
we can see will save us and always on the upward swing the small despair that's our only certainty of gain and then the momentary stop, the view that tops
the other side and then again the fall toward, away from, what we love and fear.
Martin Galvin has had poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The New Republic, JAMA, Commonweal, The Christian Science Monitor, Midwest Review, OntheBus and many others. His book Wild Card won the Columbia Award (1989) judged by Howard Nemerov.
