« Taylor Graham » SEE-THROUGH WINGS You collect insects, itchy jewels dazzling as cut-glass that intensifies reflected light. As if you’d always lived under glass. You watch the world spin by, remote, astonishing as fancy: a once-famous figure skater whirling among screams and shards of shattered windshield. An artist pieces it back together: that dim aristocratic house across the street, old wallpaper under a magnifying lens, bursting into rhapsodic sparks; your mother in tears like a half- diced onion. But you remain Tatter-Demalion, Prince of Skies. Another hapless insect hazards its bright winged path to you through air. CAMOUFLAGE You cleaned house all morning then drove in August heat & traffic with a trailer-load of junk; tin cans & cardboard, newspaper to recycle. Got home ragged. Walked out one last time to fill the birdbath & water the periwinkle that’s never prospered, blossoms just blue enough to prove it’s still alive. And that’s where Bullfrog showed himself, camouflaged like any housewife inside her life. Dull-mottled. Frog, singer of songs to celebrate the ancient watery beginnings, gurgling like your garden hose; & transformation (isn’t that what recycling’s all about?); & cleansing (your newly-vacuumed house); & rebirth. Ah, there’s the tough part. Frog only sings the possibilities. Do you dare bend down and kiss him? GHOST-STORIES Who was that pale-cheeked girl at summer camp? All she recalls, now, are pink-eye and a white cot in the infirmary. Fifty years ago, must be the breakdown of memory with age. Whatever happened to the girl who listened to blackbirds singing in the willows? Who was that ghost of a girl who picked paintbrush blooming in a bend of the creek? All she recalls is a blizzard of feathers in some pillow fight and the other little campers scampering like spirits into the dark. Her memory. Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, she also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere. She is also included in the new anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004).