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Taylor Graham USA
piper@innercite.com
I live at the end of a little dirt
road in the Sierra Nevada, with a husband, three German Shepherds and
one black cat. My husband and I are volunteer search-and-rescue dog
handlers, veterans of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and hundreds of
other searches for missing, trapped, and drowned persons.
We’re also involved in recovery efforts for cavity-nesting birds;
every week during the nesting season we hike our “bluebird trails” in
the foothills of the Mother Lode and in the high country, checking on
baby birds until they fledge.
My poems have appeared in America, The Chattahoochee Review, The Iowa
Review, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Yankee and elsewhere. My
latest collection is An Hour in the Cougar’s Grace (Pudding House,
2000). |
RECLAIMING OUR DOG
You spent two nights here
(ward @ $90.00) and sport a buzz
on your butt (no charge) and shaved
front legs (the catheters and all).
Anyone who cares can read your spine
in white-on-black myelogram ($230.00,
not to mention spinal fluid, x-ray
thorax, anesthesia level 4). A vet-
in-training scratches your left ear,
you smile. Meanwhile we pay
the front-desk bill, which could
support a family of four.
We shake hands all around,
the white-coats with their charts
and stethoscopes who saved you.
And now you trot along beside us
out the door. Not the same
as always, not unscathed. Maybe
not as good. But dearer.
EXIT 39
Her hands are on the steering but the way
her mouth brakes at the corner, you can tell
she didn't want to be westbound on this
interstate, her Suburban bearing her farther
into mid-week. Billboards urge a trade-in
but she'd never get full value for the wheels,
the engine needing overhaul. Windshield
wipers click a tempo under wet unlaundered
sky. And now in the slow lane exiting,
her kids are crying, she's flicking signals
with such urgent hands, you know she didn't
mean to get off here.
“Exit 39" is included in Next Exit (Cedar
Hill, 1999)
INTERMEZZO, March 14th, VIENNA
A clarinet against the forte, and then
again he hears it through the open pane
from beneath a Lent-blackened stage:
this somber season, no human voice
is allowed its song. Strings and wind,
percussive metal; not a human voice.
Out here, littered notes and measures
tramped on snow by people with business
counting calendar, not a one of them
singing. Fresh fallen snow already dirty
on the street, unshriven, freezing again
by evening. Inside, that faint permitted
music, instrumental; no human voice.
Out here, dumb pavement under foot,
wheels spattering ice and slush; cries
of hucksters, wheezing cab-horses, curses.
A player finds his entrance as he may:
against the empty pocket, numb lips
blowing into wordless brass, while he keeps
syllables clumped in his brain, waiting for
a block to roll away, license to rejoice.
AFTER THE GUESTS HAVE LEFT
Gravel glistens on the drive
but the far side of floodlights is dark
as the garden hushed and heavier tonight
with rain. However well
you listen, still you might not hear
the least amoeba going about its business
of life, the multitude of worms coiling
blind through soil, the underground
spaghetti of roots reaching
to interlace
without one word.
THE ROOKERY
In the cranny of this cliff, time ticks
backwards: from fledglings back to naked
nestlings, to eggs unhatched, the barren
matings. Wings are gone. I squat
beside the guano-whitened cribs. So many
softly feathered corpses, so many dry-
stick circles full of oval coffins.
Scientists could explain all this. DDT
or acid rain, a human plague on birds.
But I didn't come for science, much less
for guilt.
I came to take snapshots
of the lighthouse and lounge on the beach.
I'd best go back to the hotel and order lunch.
But please, no eggs. No chicken à la
anything. Below my window, no plaza
full of prancing marble, whitewashed
by pigeons slopping everything
with backward-winging time.
“The Rookery” is included in Next Exit
(Cedar Hill, 1999)
© All Copyright, Taylor
Graham.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.
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