TIDES

Systolic/diastolic, a steady
tide through arteries and veins.

Remember the backwaters
you two walked together once

on a side-trip to somewhere else.
How could living water push through

those algae-clogged trickles
over red-splotched rock

over so many years, so many heartbeats?
Tonight, you’ll walk out

listening for the downstream flow,
September; listen for him

as he whistles his path back home.
Under a new moon, listen

for him tapping his way among trees.
Feel how the dark moon pulls

our tides, that larceny of blood.




RIVIERA PORTRAIT

Here she is on vacation, sultry
as an afternoon, lips darkly sweet
as blackberries. Left hand (la sinistra)
limp – no, lax, at leisure, ripe
fruit of a theatrical gesture.

It’s a portrait-collage: Here’s the score
of an opera she attended, tragedy
made beautiful. And in the background,
what’s that ancient building
hazed by distance, or smudged

by a dirty thumb? Shuttered windows,
blank eyes staring out. The artist should
have painted that over, covered it up.
She’s supposed to be superimposed
like a film-star. But once you start

a picture, can you ever quite erase
the under-layers? Pigment brushed on
pigment, this afternoon on top of
yesterday. Beautiful new memories. Just
look at her face.




IN THE TIERGARTEN

You want to see the polar bears.

Remember that Atlantic crossing –
gray waves sluicing the decks,
I imagined icebergs as we navigated
through the dark.

Can exotic places uplift us
from the world we know?

We landed. The harbor smelled
of diesel and burnt coffee.
We were serenaded by backup beeps
of trucks, by taxi horns and sirens.

For now, I’ll seek out
the reptile house. Warm and safe
from weather; serpents moving
silent behind glass.

Go see the polar bears yourself.


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).