Taylor Graham

OLD DIGGINGS

Shall I go with you
to the Barrow-Downs? Weather-scoured
landscape, stone that stays.
From time out of keeping, a temple
in skeleton. So many questions.
The sun casts answer-shadows
as the seasons fade.
Human problems solved, resolved
by Time’s dissolutions.
Must I go back centuries
with you to find a history?
How firmly terra firma’s rooted
in the grave.


CRESCENDO

Stormy afternoon, the wind
plays cadenzas in shingle and branch,
a confusing fandango as oak leaves whirl
this way – then that – across the lawn,
the cat shelters under an elm-
tree bough, hoping for rain to be
done. Distant thunder,
coming closer.

You wanted to be outdoors
looking for bellflowers, fairy lanterns
in the woods, magic of a natural
world. Instead we huddle under the
lightning rod. Incandescence
ignites every window as
boom! go
the walls of home.


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).

Current Issue:
January 2010

Taylor Graham
Eliza Hannon
Jamie Elliott Keith
Michael Keshigian
Mary McCall
Simon Perchik
Josh Thompson
Patricia Wellingham-Jones
 

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