mirrored in the pond
ripples unsteadily
above the roof-vee
where a mallard’s stationed
resolutely facing north,
inverted weather-vane.
My daughter’s face is just a dish
inside that insubstantial window frame.
She can’t see me here,
nor does she know
from where I sit
the world’s turned upside down
for one of us.
I start the car. Turn south.
The water ripples.
[+]
Stan Galloway teaches writing and literature at Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. His poetry has appeared online at vox poetica, Loch Raven Review, Indigo Rising Magazine, Eunoia Review, Contemporary World Literature, Connotation Press, Caper Literary Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, The Atrium, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters, and Apollo’s Lyre. In print, his poems have shown up in WestWard Quarterly, Midnight Zoo, Carapace, the Burroughs Bulletin, and the anthologies Love Be Write and Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Second Century. His book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan, came out in 2010.
