Strange Air

Under the high inhuman sighs of wind
above fog, you’re dark
as only a soul inside the walls
of someone else’s
house can be. Angel
of the high lonesome,
when you used to call that
name, did you mean
yourself? Now wind sweeps
the upper reaches
of the brain
clean. Between dark and waking,
so much fog rises.
Down the hall,
Someone’s flicked on a light,
the thin under-door crack
of 40 measured watts.
Not you. Were you ever
here, at home?

Squandered

I have only this much time
before the evening news begins:
all the where-and-when that occurred
today, with connective tissue
of the why-commentaries. I only have
this half hour before the sun
slips its gold-leaf between clouds
and the west ridge, leaving me
nothing but brittle oak-
skins hanging like a proof
of fact.
Tonight the moon will be
almost full of its empty light.
Light of the sun that set
on a factual world.
As if anyone could sleep
and reappear on the other
side like dawn.

Quick Study

Mama’s Little Angel peeks out
from under his blue fleece blanket
when no one’s looking;
not the gentle granny-couple
selling mouthwash by the glow
of the TV screen; not the mailman
squinting through the postal slot
that lets in more than a toddler
knows of news and weather;
not big brother Bobby who invents
rules of ownership for a bouncy
belching basketball,
that strange globe that eludes
an infant’s grasp
of kingdoms beyond a blue
fleece blanket.
So Mama’s Angel ducks back
underneath and dreams a world
snugglier than any other
home he’ll ever know.

Taylor Graham

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 America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Email: Taylor Graham

Return to Table of Contents