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Secret Lives
Last night while you slept
in your old gray union-suit,
in dream I danced with a boy.
No, the boy danced with a snake
thick as a boa coiling
without music over muscled biceps
forearms wrists tattooed in a paisley
pattern, a Moorish garden or
Byzantine mosaic, a net of ruby
scallops, a weave in midnight-
crimson; the snake as deeply
scaled, its diamond-back obsidian
and scarlet.
All night you slept safe
in flannel. And then, outside
the glass, the owl called twice,
a wild thing shrieked and died,
and it was dawn.
We woke
from our sheets to the same
old daily dance. And who
to dance with me
but you.
Lost
I shut the folders
full of reports
of old losses. The child
who wandered off in a rain
cold as blue fingers.
The old man whose mind
got drunk on a fermented
past.
My dogs never followed
fast enough to catch them
disappearing.
Those dogs still scenting
beyond the edge
of vision.
Dogs from twenty years ago
with bones as dry
as the dust they printed
running
away out of sight.
I shut the binders
as if that could stop me
from calling
dead names.
The Snows of Havana
The traffic light blows its red whistle.
Everyone’s in such a hurry
to get where they don’t want to go.
The air smells like hibiscus,
the hot-tar parking lot grabbing
at the soles of my shoes.
My brother-in-law’s car door coughs open.
I swallow yellow, it tastes of stucco,
the way my sister wished to honey-
moon in Havana when it was still singing
under palms, the quaint little alleys
smelling of cobbles and piss.
"Sweet Jan, your heart won’t wake up again
from the dream that too much loves you."
She threw out all the photos
of her mind. No matter how we blame
somebody else, the fire and the flood, all
the usual disasters, I can’t find my own
sister’s smile. Où sont les neiges?
My brother-in-law won’t listen
to the song of losses. They smell
of mud and piss and hibiscus. Instead
he walks through those sighing doors
where everyone comes out
healed, dead,
purified
of memory.
Telephonic
You call to tell me a secret
through the static
that comes between the living
and the no-longer. Your voice
has that breathless, about-to-launch
quality. I sit here
alive with the receiver
in my ear
like the dock-man
after the Pinta and the Niña
are lost in distance
and the Santa Maria is nothing
but a prayer. Sweet
anticipation of landfall,
your sails
against a dead sunset.
c2005 Taylor Graham
~Fall 2005~
Where
There's a Wind
Your face hovers
like cloud, your voice
the northwind
scribing a polar circle.
I sleep shallow
so as not to miss
your passing or
mistake it for grief.
You left a dream-disk
full of poems.
I love that they aren't
love-songs.
Even your moonlight
assumes the bald
color of wind
sweeping south-southwest
over flat nothing,
to prove
you were poet
of the wolf's howl,
of the great tree
that falls.
It's quite silent.
As it felled you
I never heard
it fall.
c2005
Taylor Graham
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"Expressionism" 2005 Alexandre
Nodopaka
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