CLOSET

Boxes and boxes of foolscap
covered with pencil scribblings.
Here’s a graphite sketch of seabirds,
small curved v’s against storm clouds.
In a salt-marsh stands a heron,
one-legged ampersand, bright eye focused
on rippling water. And here’s a horse
mid-gallop across a redrock mesa –

all these creatures caught as if
alive. What memories did they evoke
for a man who never traveled
beyond this asphalt city? How long
they’ve sat in boxes breathing
in the closet darkness,
waiting for free air.




OBSERVATORY

Could there once have been wetlands on Mars?
he muses. She’ll be thinking of the moon,
a lovers’ moon that’s almost full tonight,
rising over this hilltop with its dome
for crystal-gazing at the stars.

But just consider what science makes
of burned-out matter, space-dust, against
what poets see: the vivid stars shine out
in radiant Files, a rocky romance
of gravity’s attraction, one heavenly

body for another. Think of Saturn.
How many other worlds beyond
our lenses, light-years of space observed
to a vanishing-point, planets with moons
to bind them all about with tiny rings?

Rings are likely on her mind as well.
She’s watching Venus glitter
like the brightest Star of Love,
as constellations circle and this point
of Earth revolves toward morning.


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. 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). My 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).