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?
