October 11-17, 2004: Taylor Graham and Cyril Wong

Taylor Graham and Cyril Wong

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Bio (auto)

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 Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the new anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004).

The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Taylor Graham and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Junking the ’87 Tercel Of course we’ll keep the tape-deck that played “Milestones” up the Central Valley; “Lost Highway” through downtown Stockton; and “Let It Snow” on the jeep trail to Promontory Point The Goodyears don’t have much tread left The catalytic doesn’t convert now, and the DieHard won’t hold another winter’s starts The brakes have already saved us from too many mountains with a view We’ll hold on to one license plate for memory’s sake, and the rearview mirror, as if mercury on glass could give back 200,000 miles of our lives The engine rests inside its metal mask, which rusts A thin wind fingers its way over worn seats; swirls and eddies our dust of 15 driven years We used to fit here, now we’re gone Beyond the wreck-yard’s cyclone fence, traffic moves on. Trail to Showers Pass Mid-July, 8000 feet Already the snowpack’s melted, the creek’s run dry Wildflowers past their prime; we should have come two weeks ago We climb through butterweed burned a brown crisp, and lupine going to pod And here’s indigo delphinium heaped against gold in a shady nook of willow where a white-crowned sparrow sings its nest We’ve counted seven shades of Indian paintbrush But who cares for flowers when above our heads thunder-brows are gathering a glower Nature can always change our plans Here, in the interlude, let’s pause under the threat of tremendous weather Write me a poem on paper petals, each word a seed, each line a careful row In coming snowstorms every syllable might bloom. In Uniform my dog and I stand at the baggage carousel, waiting for my duffle My dog checks every bag as it goes by: is this one mine? To right and left, passengers pull aside Is the dog sniffing for drugs? Or bombs, exploding shoes? They never even noticed her sleeping at my feet, LAX to Sacramento, after days of trudging the scrub-dry arroyos, backside of suburban hills, searching for a child whose face they’ve seen on TV news all week We’ve done our job, we’re going home Not a passenger meets my eyes Then my dog nudges an old worn duffle, and sits at heel I retrieve my bag And suddenly on all sides, travelers thank us for coming, for making everything all right They give room for us to pass Their luggage has been blessed. What to Take in Red-Flag Fire Weather Grab your racing pulse, your pupils branded with the image of flames coming over the next hilltop Leave behind the half- eaten rhubarb pie, the garden pool with its koi and golden ripples Give up your wish to live on a wild frontier.

Bridges A secret kept even from ourselves: how bridges are falling between the imagined word and the spoken one, between what I say and what you actually hear If you could slow time down, perhaps you might even hear them falling Bridges of years our hearts have signed away to crumble, collapse down the middle, leaving behind a gasp of air between two banks, wide with unspoken truths, a thousand pleas for empathy New bridges are rising into form, incompletion, then falling away Maybe it is this moment of our lives, when the bridges left standing are the ones we miss,  when the ones we did not mean to build we built from betrayal, regret, guilt and loss. Fishing Carver wrote so many poems about fishing that I would read them all too quickly When I read elsewhere that he stopped writing stories and turned to poetry before he died, I returned that evening to those poems again, envisaging his cancer as a dark fish hovering just beyond the end of each idyllic line break, the page like an open sea everywhere beneath each poem, sucking at the underside of every word like a boat it could overturn if it chose.  Dear Jeffery Dahmer Armin Meiwes put up an ad for a man agreeable to slaughter After turning away five candidates, Bernd Juergen Brandes  knocked on his door On their first and final date, Bernd had his penis removed, cooked and shared between them Armin said, “My friend enjoyed dying, death” Dear Jeffery, how beautifully consensual! Imagine it: “Would you like it steamed, fried or simply raw? Also, where would you keep my head in the morning? And what colour will you paint my bones?” Imagine it! To Meet Your Sky With you, there is neither a choice nor any kind of resistance; my body is at once nothing and everything you can possibly take I watch from the tale as you carry emptied glasses into the kitchen — they slash sunlight into ribbons, gleam like so many knives in a sink Roughly, you turn on the tap to wash your hands, then approach like a shadow lengthening across the floor, eyes shiny as blades, your body closing in Pausing to hover, you lift my chin like the lid of a music box, as arms once mine take off to meet your sky. Blue Breath Without resistance, you step into my body, nudging Shut the door behind you, Then proceed to flick on every light In the living room, you Observe the fading portrait of my parents – Even in death, that demonstration Of distance, withdrawal, exact As the wooden frame around their image – Mourning the white of a wall You look up And promise to remember The graffiti of poems on the ceiling, coagulating At the speed of injury, grievous life Images of others I have loved Far less than you fade too from these walls, Melting like clocks under your vision’s ray Parting a window easily by its curtains, you Let in the sky’s bluest breath, shaking those flowers Beautiful, lined up like a row Of happier memories, shadows laughing Up and down their long and breakable necks. A Bluer Sky If this turns to friendship, it only means That one of us will suffer That when we meet after the worse of endings, There will only be this skein of words between us – Most of them for boredom, fewer for loneliness – Rising out of our mutual space of breath, leaving Behind a bluer sky each moment of departure And one of us will cling on to its blue, Hung on partings like a muted cloud, while The other rides on a wing of word away from here.