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Taylor Graham
Winter 2008
OBITUARY
No life is perfect. So much depends
on the train schedule,
no accidents, the ship not sailing
without you. Or, in a different context,
how many horns of a dilemma
in the minds of the powers-that-be,
those script-writers for the puppet-
show. Still you kept such faith
as the puppet in the hands
of the great puppet-master knows,
the tightening of strings at wrist
and ankle, keeping step with the insistent
tug; holding belief in the overhead
view, however it pierces
right through pupil and retina
to lodge at the back of the skull
like migraine. Visionaries
must travel on foot, peering
into windows like so many voyeurs
of the human race.
INEVITABILITY OF WAR
If a rancher cuts a farmer’s fence
across his idea of a road
to better pasture, does this change
a whole country’s reckoning
of right?
All the while, hillsides slough
in late-spring rains, carrying off
somebody’s survey pin. Ruts erode, sandy
grain by grain. Yerba santa
occupies the berm.
If a neighbor shoots a neighbor
in the hand that cut the cable
across a road, what’s that
compared to the body count
in Baghdad?
Here in South County, old-timers
stir up dust, gunning it down
the outside curve, and newcomers
gate out anyone who might
want to make a home here.
Spring 2007
COLORS OF SPRING
Down in the parking lot
jacarandas drop sticky blue-lavender
blossoms all over the doctors’ cars.
Up here, the AC is set full-blast
to impede decomposition.
Nothing’s changed since yesterday.
Your father has a bruise
where they peeled away the oxygen,
old man blue-lavender
from the blunt-force of air
against skin stretched over so many
years. In the next bed
an identical lavender-blue man
with a lavender-pink woman standing
over him, berating so softly
I can’t make out the words
of a chronic complaint.
But neither man is listening,
their vitals stay the same.
These things go on forever
PENITENTIARY
Over the summit the wind-
machines are ranged like angels
making light. So many angular angels
with whirligigs in their hair,
3-point halos. Electric
cyclone fences with concertina
wire. Inside, the inmates shiver,
while motorists not yet charged
drive as far as they can away.
The wind sweeps through
faster than the posted speed.
Avoid Overheating the sign says,
as the gauge quivers between desert
extremes. Here’s the exit
for a mine of dried-up dreams.
So many souls held for time.
It’s never Christmas.
On deserted streets hang iron bells.
When the first snow falls, they ring
with their clappers of wind.
Previously published in Mannequin Envy
fall 2006
Enigma Variations
You chose the lobster alfredo
with a pale chardonnay.
The bride’s in sculpted roses
of a champagne shade.
She wears an unfocused smile
that hovers over no one
in particular, a sea breeze
whispering fare-thee
in her veil.
Double rings encompass
one world and leave
the rest out. Now, lifted glasses
garter the bouquet;
a barter-dance for fivers,
and she floats away.
Remember how the yachts rock
airily-uneasy
in their slips. Beyond
plate-glass, remember
the scent of breakers.
Pelicans plummet
after fish.
One great blue heron
still as hammered metal
waits.
Secrets
"Without a secret you could never be alone."
-- James DenBoer
The dragon in the science lab,
his scales illuminated by the ghost-
light of Bunsen burners
in the dark, when the white
coats are hung up by the door.
Oh dreams of chemistry and synapse,
why your son’s brain works
the way it does, and doesn’t.
How I saw his dragons in my child-
hood, they lived
in the bathroom drain.
How I thought I schooled them
all away.
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
Alex Nodopaka "Expressionism"
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.
Taylor Graham
Bio: I’m a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also help my husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. My poems have appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and I’m included in the new anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). My manuscript The Downstairs Dance Floor is winner of this year's Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. It is now available from Texas A&M University Press Consortium
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