HOLE IN THE WALL

On your anniversary you dreamed rodents.
Thirty-four years, the house inhabited by invisible
nibblers: half-chewed popcorn in the pantry,
small scat in the cellar. Scurry of feet and scatter
of small objects. Shreds of gnawings
all over the floor.

A husband sleeps through it all. You dreamed
extermination. Snap-traps. Poison.
Shotgun. One of the creatures trusted you
with its soft eyes. You maimed it and let it go.
A marriage. In the morning you began
searching every corner.


IVY
Ivy M. 1871-1959

They named me for a vine that grasps
for any handhold in a standing wall.
One husband after another died.
I ended up here
with hollyhocks fading against a fence,
half a continent from where I started
in the snow. Here, magnolia
petals fall tarnished on the porch.

Too California-blonde, my daughter’s
daughter knows nothing
but to smile at the sun. Such wild
sprouting goes on behind her eyes.
While she naps, dreaming,
I do indoor chores to Queen for a Day
on the radio. So many women worse off.
Any handhold in a standing wall,

and at last it’s ivy holding the wall
up. I think of children in hospital,
clip gay pictures from magazines,
paste them into story-books. Always
there’s someone worse off. But
how a California grandchild grows like
some exotic flower blooming without
a vine, a root, a handhold.


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she is included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006) is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest is Among Neighbors (Rattlesnake Press, 2007).