Maybe you’re right when you say
that the bleeding church walls
and headless biblical figures
on stained glass represent
“the socio-cultural foibles

of the collective,” lady, but what
does it mean when three
nights running I’ve stood
where tall Spartina obscures
the marsh channels that drain
and fill with the tides,

and seen two men walking on water
for an instant, before their barge
rounds the bend and there are four,
one poling, one hanging onto
the long rudder, and two rowing,
seated in the stern behind piled hay
and the haying machine?

Why do I dream them in a windless,
fetorless heat like sepia, and swimming
behind those oarsmen, its head like
a gray seal’s, the old horse whose name
I somehow know is Joseph, a halo
of greenflies dissolving around his ears?

Brendan Galvin has published 16 collections of poems, the most recent being Whirl Is King: Poems from a Life List (2008). On April 25, he was honored with the Boston College Arts Council Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement.