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IDEAL CHARACTERS
- They were ideals, that were more vivid than the abstract reals
of actual, human life.
- Elihu Burritt, "The Reality and Mission of Ideal Characters"
Elihu, across a century and a half
I imagine you
journeying by staff, incognito,
to the furthest northern reaches
like some saint or hero
of ancient legend.
How time softens the edges
as it polishes the focus.
Still, if I wished,
I could list your faults:
naive, impractical and otherworldly,
blindly optimistic, a dreamer.
Don Quixote without squire,
damsel, or horse.
The evening news tells me enough
of the dreamless side.
CHRESTOMATHY
A word she still remembers, as in
Chrestomathie de L'ancien Francais,
which sits on her shelf, a familiar spine
unbroken by the years.
He's gathered for her this new
collection in English, a language
foreign to her now -- her vocabulary
rudimentary, pronunciation
hesitant, brows folded
like blank sheets of paper inward.
This new book --poems pasted
in a binder -- she puzzles over
till he begins to read, limning
with his finger the lines.
Emerson, then Whitman -- those two
in company used to perplex
him; now they seem aged but hale
comrades-in-arms against the gray.
"They are alive and well
somewhere," he reads.
She smiles, and taps her eyes,
looks upward; rifles
through the book, dog-earing pages,
jabs a word with her nail.
Thomson, old blank-verseman. "I
have!" she declares. "And sung of
Nature with unceasing joy," she
recites to him out loud.
THE OTHER HALF OF A WORLD
His hands grip the lectern
by both its sides. Does he expect it
to buck and get away? Big
hands, as if toughened at the forge;
they could shoe a knight's great horse
or raise the mainsail of a frigate.
But these are other times,
and his hands have opened, palms
outward, bright against the black
habit as the shores of Morocco
open their arms full of tangerines
and cinnamon.
They beckon a tenement child
of smokestacks
who just last night dreamed
peaches and hibiscus, and woke up
famished with the taste
of Medina on her tongue.
Does he think he can
make her reach out
her right hand?
How wide the ocean
in between.
All he can say is "Yes."
WASHING DISHES HERE
The first time, 1985, at my trailer sink,
I looked past spoons and forks
at sunset, till darkness gathered
in the oaks. No one, I was sure,
had ever washed dishes here before.
In 1991 I unpacked my mother's best recipes
stuck into a Bible. Blue Willow, a few
dried peas, letter from no one I ever
heard of. In her later years she lost
the knack for keeping things.
Christmas 2002. Under the great black-oak
I buried china shards and stoneware
after the cupboard shattered onto kitchen
tiles. The old oak fell a week later
in a storm. Its cordwood keeps us warm.
It's 2007. Every piece of glassware's
smudged with living. I've given so many
things away - who needs so much?
I hold up one water-glass against
the window-pane and look at evening.
A HEART FULL OF MEMORY
- Critics deny the existence of proof that memories
can be transplanted along with organs. . . Some . . .
attribute personality changes in transplant recipients
to the heavy drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection.
- --Jurriaan Kamp, "Our Hearts Are Full of Memory"
I woke up with the heart of my enemy, the one
with his hand on a rifle on the other side
of walls and concertina wire, the brother or son
of the man with a bomb in his belt,
who on a morning of Saturday market
blew up the stall of grapes and fresh melons
along with my mother, my sister.
After I heard the news, my heart
I've stopped my engine in a pull-out
high overhead, a red-tail screams
where a compost heap absorbs morning's
And then came a long dull winter.
But now my dog is whining
head up, nose taking in the news.
As if survivor of a mismatched
Imagine how
before the final cut.
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 is included in the anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). (Oct. 2005, April 2006, December 2006, August 2007, February & April 2008).
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sickened and died. They cut it out and filled
the empty space with the heart
of the enemy. They pumped me full
of drugs so I couldn't reject those dark
chambers of blood. I woke up
asking for candy --
Sticky sweet, red and melting
under the tongue. A strange after-tang
as if I could taste a kiss
on the mouth of my enemy. How could this
new heart reject such love?
IN THE DARK
The power's out.
The 24/7 supermarket's shut: its endless
circuit of shelves & prices, its stubborn
registers of cash are closed. The lines
are down, the current's cut; a string
of streetlights stands in ominous
silhouette. Night has overflowed
the dike.
But hark --unseen
overhead, some first tones
start. Way up high
as from a catwalk, one soft note
& then another,
a jazzy riff, a spark.
Somebody's improvising wind-
fall apples
ripening without refrigeration
in a song; wild-
flower honey for the sake of bees;
& pears with a blemish of sweet-
brown rot, perishable
as stars.
Tonight it comes down like
manna for our famished
spirits in the dark.
PERMANENCE
As if the plains extended, endless
and immortal as this dirt road
we're driving, beyond the asphalt
two-lane, its pavement washed away
in season after season of rain;
beyond the fork where we turned left,
looking for something interesting.
Ruts and gullies and a crumbling
rock wall where used to be home-
stead, and just now, our windshield
shattered by sun and blue sky.
PASSAGES
How long
since an owl called
just before dawn?
In the morning I find
feathers and fur,
scraps of bones
hollow as
words. Remember
how we
used to follow wild
footprints.
A flight of quail.
One image after
another,
blurring wings.
CODE
The owl's fixed eye
in its swivel face, the moon
full as a bloated tongue.
You're running in your bald
white nightshirt till
the squealing revolving lights
find you, you draw
them to you. Flashing
red a thready pulse
that fades, his blood leaking gently
between words. Feathers.
His features
pale as the moon mask,
eyes unequal
to dawn.
A ROAD CUTS THROUGH IT
With sun-shades, cameras and notebooks,
a geology class studies the cutbank
for what it knows of faults.
to listen for the whisper of snake
through annual grasses dying. Then
his single question: what brings all
these humans to a hawk's territory?
LIKE SONG
Light through the sluice of dawn
has all the neighborhood dogs barking
for the unlinking of chains
and unbarring of doors; for masters'
reluctant discernment
of this world by its uncountable
odors.
Oh the cosmopolitan
nose, which scans the trash-bins
lined up curbside for Thursday pick-up;
takes in a funky runnel down gutters;
then runs for the outskirts,
first warming rays
and begins to steam and throng.
These mingled fragrances
swell in a dog's mind
like song.
DOG BREEZE
It was a hot old summer.
I couldn't trust a spark of inspiration,
it was sure to flare up into wild-
fire. Just look at this
notebook full of the ashes
of dead poems.
Rain grumbled down the gutters,
washing away whole sentences.
I bundled up in quilts,
trying to remember a single
sodden verb.
at the door. I turn the knob
and feel the wooosh of air
in my face. My dog's full-sail
out of the doldrums,
the dead-horse latitudes,
Let's walk out to greet
February, let's listen to
its every word.
TIMELINESS
At last you've left off
all pretense of counting calories,
of fiscal responsibility,
and wearing pantyhose.
marriage, or the cargo of a liner
lost in flight,
you nurture such incredible
blush-magenta roses.
they spring from thornbush,
each blossom flinging itself,
a frenzied dancer