top of page

Stan Galloway

Sonnet 130
by William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.

I Smell Onions

I smell onions on your breath and
think of Shakespeare’s wire-haired mistress.
You, too, submit to gravity
                                          and time.

There’s no mistaking
your pretty human voice
for birdsong,
no wings or halo to confuse
my dull mortal senses.


For all the beauty of the nightingale’s call
and the sudden thrill of heavenly annunciation,
I’d rather hear you,

                             stepping through the doorway,

                                                                               say my name,

with plain old
fallible
human
affection.

First published in Just Married

Unbound Content, 2013

Failed Romance

The little boy offers his best fire truck
and invites her to the box
while she sees the castles that he
has not built and the prince who
has not ridden to the rescue.
He says he likes the way she shows the
ribbon in her hair, meaning he likes
the way she shows the ribbon in her hair,
while she hears the one-tenth
surface to a nine-tenths depth he
won’t reveal.
He reaches out to tie the shoe-
string that falls loose and she
begins to list the hundred other
broken things he’s failed to see, thinking
love and entropy are opposites.
He drives his cars around her,
happy that she chose to squat with him
for a time, and she wonders
why he needs her there while
he does his own thing oblivious.
Then she begins to talk and talk and he
turns his ear to her and finally sys,
again, he likes the ribbon and
she turns away and leaves the box
to the shallow boy
with the one-track mind.

First published in Scratching Against the Fabric

Unbound Content, 2015

Gunnlod's Lament

Previously published in

Bluing the Blade.

                       i 

Father has been strange

since my hips and breasts have swelled

treating me like treasure and disease

​

I trust him -- sometimes -- to care for me

but I admit I'm baffled and afraid of 

being mountain-sealed -- a kind of living vault.

​

Three kegs of magic mead to guard -- perhaps --

or just a pretext to secret me away from

lustful       ugly      hurtful men.

​

What kind of promise is it not to share

a single taste of mead with giant, man, or dwarf

when secret tunnels hundred-sealed and filled stand in the way?

​

Father carved a bed of stone and laid it deep with sheepskin

fitted me with brittle biscuits and salt meat

supplied a hundred crannied lamps to keep out loneliness.

​

I am the only one he trusts -- he said so -- 

to secure his reputation      his prestige

now buried in this mountainside.

​

                        ii

How many days or months have passed?

The lamps provide no clue

I have not counted biscuits.

​

The only hugs my body feels, I give myself.

The only voice my ears can hear is mine.

The only dreams my mind can find recycle.

​

The dripping of the spring becomes a ping of painful echo.

The salt exceeds the spring's ability to quench.

The lamps stir shadow creatures on the walls. I'm mad, I think.

​

                         iii

I never knew such joy could be!

I heard the worm-gnaw long before the fissure opened

and through the wimble-wake my dream produced a man.

​

To feel his hands where only mine had touched

to hear a voice not of the timbre of my own

to grasp pricklings I had never dreamed in sheepskins --

this is what comes of madness. Pure    joyous     madness

to have his company: his mind in my thoughts

his words in my ears, his body merged with mine.

​

                       iv

This is what it means to die! He was no man. No dream.

In my ecstasy, he told me that no man, no dwarf, no giant

could have entered in my guarded    secret place.

​

My vow would not be compromised if he took

three small sips from the magic mead

my father charged my life upon. So I said yes.

​

He quaffed it all. I could see suddenly he had one eye. Odin!

And as I watched he transformed to an eagle

whose terrific wings spread wide and burst the mountain.

 

I was betrayed. The stars wept in the black sky.

I lay exposed in mountain rubble     waiting

for paternal wrath to end my being      if I'm still alive.

Lunch While Hiking Across
Laugarvatnfjall

.

High on the ridge

we find the cairns

a dozen

             fifteen

                       eighteen

some just three stones

                 standing

                  vertically

some piled to my elbow

no other sign of human visitation.

​

Wind from the snowbank farther on

says, Dwarfs once drank here

And I think elves, more likely

than dwarfs or trolls

                               more spritely

                                         energetic

                                         light-hearted.

​

Frost answers, But it's not elves exactly*--

some preterhuman operator at work

that reverses gravity

                      entropy

stands on its head

and lets the circulation

                                    pump

                         dizzily.

​

We drink water           hiking bottles filled at a spring

                                                                     farther down the slope

       eat hardfiskur             bread dried from haddock 

                                                    natural

                                                     hardy

       watch moss grow               gray

                                                  green

                                                  ochre

       smell Arctic thyme                its purple dots behind

                                                                             ahead

                           time side-stepped. . . .

 

A golden plover pipes its high-C

                                     a single piccolo eighth note

imploring us to move on.

​

​

*"Mending Wall," Robert Frost

Lunch While Hiking Across Laugarvatnfjall
bottom of page