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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Seeing You Off
After watching two-seaters
ease against their tie-downs,
staring eyeless windowed
at a world of drop-offs
under cloud;
after so long listening for
the mounting drone
that isn’t weather but
is always weather’s child;
after I asked again “have you
forgotten?”—as if counting
pills and socks and shorts
could anchor you as far as Monday;
after tasting a thirst in the windsock heat
but not daring turn away
from watching sky,
how it measures, seamless, our horizons,
so I swallowed and denied
the thirst;
after thinking
this waiting wouldn’t stop:
a dark cross buzzed and circled overhead,
tilted its wings, dropped down,
took you.
Then the drone screamed,
rose and circled,
banked away shrinking.
I begin the wait.
[Originally published in Poetry Magazine online and in the chapbook Harmonics (Poet's Corner Press, 2003)]
Artist’s Statement
In 1994 I attended a poetry workshop, and one of the main things I brought away from it was the challenge to take more risks, to reveal more of my feelings in my poems. I’ve always shied away from being a “confessional” poet, and I’m more comfortable with sensory images than with talking about emotion.
Not long after the workshop, my husband responded to a search for a hiker lost in the Sierra; for some reason, I couldn’t go on the search. I drove him and his search dog to the local airfield, perched on top of a ridge overlooking miles of canyons and ridges. I’ve had enough close calls in small planes to make me nervous about flying. We had to wait over an hour for the CAP plane that would take my husband to the search; I had lots of time to think, and the images started coming. I scribbled lines on a piece of scratch paper, and pretty much had the poem done by the time the plane arrived. I was trying for a poem that would join concrete sensory details with emotion, in a way that might point me in new directions.
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