Why US Poet James Galvin Is like New Zealand

American poet James Galvin’s “Why I Am Like New Zealand” featured in the New York Times recently.

Why I Am Like New Zealand
My feet stick out from beneath the sheet,
Pointing to where death thrives.
I am right side up.
I wake between tectonic plates that hurt.
I have five faults, called senses.
My brow is furrowed into alps.
My best volcano thinks
It’s high geologic time
To euthanize the sky.
Excuse me while I euthanize the sky.
My fjords ache.
My glaciers hurry.
My spine is a train wreck in a tunnel.
No one survives.
There is a bridge to nowhere, and it’s mine.
I count on being left alone.
I love the Abel Tasman Sea.
I can’t remember my discovery.

Recommended by award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder, Why I am Like New Zealand’s “comparison … at first seems lighthearted but quickly reveals physical and psychological pain: Death thrives, tectonic plates hurt,” according to American Zapruder.

“Is this a poem about aging? The end of a love affair? The environment? Maybe all three. The dark thinking of the poem continues until the surprising swerve in the last two lines, which leaves us in what W.H. Auden called ‘the clear expression of mixed feelings,’” Zapruder writes.

Original article by Matthew Zapruder, The New York Times, December 30, 2016.

Illustration by R.O. Blechman.