« Taylor Graham » PRELUDE TO A DEATH It’s like you’ve done this before. The rehearsals with various members of the full cast. Paramedics, specialists in ICU. This time, you arrive home late from work, puzzle the key into the lock. The dark entry. Silence. The silence pre-television, pre-ringing phone, before radio news and big bands on the phonograph. Even before the lilting Blue Danube on a windup Victrola he inherited from an ancient aunt when he was very young. Before running water from the tap. Tonight, the house is full of the silence that came before a rhythmic tide of breathing from the first bedroom. WORD SLINGER A lot of syllables are flying through the air, crawling out of the woods to line up in stanzas you pound out key by key. Not every word’s been caught from high ’n wild or shot absolutely dead. But you’ll sing that savage beast till it lies down sweetly at your feet. You’ve got to capture it as fast as you can write. Write it down, you say, to set it free. INSOMNIA AGAIN This is Inquisition in chains of thought, concatenating something you said or else you didn’t. They flip a light straight in your eyes: Full Moon Harvest, Hunter. Grim Reaper. Word chained to metaphor metastasizing into the pale growth of thought that eats at twisted sheets. Incandescent thirst. Sweat. Repent. 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).