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Wednesday, January 25, 2012





Here are two poems by Taylor Graham I really enjoyed. Hope you do as well and that she doesn't mind.

Taylor Graham


HOW THE STORY GOES




From heath-land to plain to escarpment,


broken reed at water’s edge, we’ve


searched for the bridging point, a way


across. Past summer, the air’s still


full of wasps, yellow swarms like tiny


ticking clocks too fast to count how time


passes into fall. We find their


paper-nests empty, deserted as winter.




I keep a paper-journey, journal


of passage place to place, always later.


Green rooms of grain-fields scythed.


Click-tick of rats in stubble, dry music


that repeats in dream. Night


watches, fires seen as far as the horizon,


swarming distant light. Life is always


a flight risk, time indigenous




as a rodent’s tooth. A king in exile


seeks home, memory, his mind. And so


we wander. How does this end?


Shadows drain color from landscape


on the other side. In time,


the page I write is paper consumed


to pulp. Tomorrow


we might find the bridging point.



MESSAGES TO EARTH

—Taylor Graham


We sent our Curiosity to Mars. But waiting

is so difficult for humans. What could we ever

solve? death, or love, peace, or hunger, life?


Late at night, might a computer record blips

from space, to chart them like French

or German for tense, mood, and person?


I follow rabbit-trails of dream in my sleep.

But my hair reaches out wild in all

directions, antennae for receiving signals.


One who knows names of stars

gazes into the night sky focusing on

the brightest body, visible at solstice


this bleakest time of year when the soul

seems ice-crystal. Planet or star?

Are its pulses a Morse code we might


decipher, to learn a language beyond

our grammar, our tongues to pronounce,

our human translations?