Taylor Graham
is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and she's included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004).
Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
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Aftermath
We hadn’t considered
the possibility of molten gold
let alone a whole crown
of gold exploding in the treetops.
We’d only wished
to burn a pile of slash.
Trash is our inheritance
when wind and flame get through
with us. One safety match
and a wand of leftover news.
Calculate our worth
against (and what civilization
hasn’t?) weather’s whims.
Something in the stars, or fate,
a nomadic hunger that sweeps
brief footprints across
sand or ash. Remember Etna,
her spew solidified
and then eroding.
Say that’s how history goes.
We only wished
to clear our yard of
flammables. No yard left
but only this vast wonder.
Charred faces blank
as a burned sheet
of paper.
Still Life After the Fire
In the black-enamel wood-stove
salvaged from the burned-out cabin
you’ve planted purple petunia,
cosmos and marigold, orange verging
toward vermilion. Now you place one
female tanager, brilliant yellow
with a flush of red, on the cast-
iron rim. Dead. Already she
draws ants and an iridescent fly.
What else to do, but make small art
of each disaster?
Fox Time
Windows down, I’m driving the S-curve
two-lane, clocking August minutes
while, beyond the highway edges,
shadows pass into purple
blackberry prime-time summer.
Behind me, on the river bank,
a young girl and her even-younger
brother are making sand-
angels in their briefly naked
afternoon that passes quicker
than the ruddy fox just
glimpsed at road-edge
before it dissolves in thicket,
disappears into a shade
of fox-time.
This Used to be an Olive Grove
Out his front window, he can see
two subdivision houses across the street,
and the street, and his own front yard.
All the houses are identical
except for the color of siding,
and some have the floor plans reversed,
and of course the olive trees.
The Youngs’ olive tree is pruned
to look Oriental; the Robinsons’
sports a sort of poodle-clip;
his own tree is gnarled and leaning.
The old man has been sitting here
a long time, watching through the window.
Nothing has changed except shadows
and the occasional car passing
or turning into a driveway
and backing out again.
There’s nothing in the view to draw
an old man’s eye except the wish
to be out there
himself, out of himself, to be
part of the view
and moving.
So lucky to be moving.
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