CARRIE’S MUSE

Moonrise morn or sunrise eve,
no answer. Carrie in a maze, in ICU.

Muse ionizes air; armor-warrior;
ironic. Sorrow? Carrie’s aura is music

in A-minor once vivace. Nurses
measure IV’s. Miseries’ mummers.

As worm scrieves an arm, an ear,
Muse remains a river. Verse survives

as aeons murmur. Memories:
acorn, anise. A vixen roams unseen.

Carrie is a rose, a rune, a ruins.
No more voice. Serene.




STARRY NIGHT

I’m dizzy from standing too long
in the material universe
up-tilted, surveying stars that swirl
particle to particle
in spirals, and boundless – ether glowing
with the harmony of their motions
till the fair moon slides away.
Since the world was made,
the pupil can take in only so much
centrifugal madness,
time uncapsuled in infinity
filling the whole immensity of space.
Where does it end,
what mind could not conceive
the flash-beam of a black cat’s eye,
should it release its hold?
The fragrance of mortality,
sunless disk of non-existence –
how sky stoops down
outreaching the arithmetic of angels
to take us.


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She's 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) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, and she’s a finalist in this year's Poets & Writers’ California Writers Exchange. Her newest book – Walking with Elihu: poems on Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith – is available on Amazon.