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search-and-rescue poems Introduction by Ken Hill It occurred to me only after I began to read these poems how rarely the themes of search and rescue are expressed in poetry. While indeed there is much verse about poor sinners gone spiritually astray, Taylor Graham is the only poet I know of who writes about people who are quite literally lost. So, for example, there are poems here about children who follow their dogs too deeply into the forest, foolish cavers who can't find their way back to the surface, and senile men and women wandering aimlessly in their "personal fogs." As well, there are also poems about the other kinds of casualties we look for: drowned swimmers, fallen climbers, suicides, runaways, and victims of earthquake, avalanche, flood, and murder. The poems are also about the people who search and rescue, all too frequently becoming casualties themselves. Experienced SAR workers will recognize the feeling of searching strange, dark places in the dead of night ("We could be in Transylvania,/the Yucatan. Backwoods/of a suburb"), what it's like to walk ten abreast through muddy bogs, the way that tracks can indeed tell a story, or the very special way a cadaver-seeker looks at a river. And we are reminded, in "Tequila on the Richter Scale," that even in the midst of disaster, there can be humor. The strongest emotions in SAR work are aroused when the casualties are children, and the most powerful poems in this book, in my view, involve this theme. For some reason, few poets have handled the death of children very well, tending too often, like Robert Bridges in "On a Dead Child," toward melodrama. There is none of that here. In "He Was Wearing a Yellow T-Shirt," Graham describes the fate of a lost child in a way that is compassionate and yet unsentimental, strikingly novel, and for people who are sometimes confronted with the deaths of lost children, perhaps even therapeutic. Many of the themes contained in Graham's poems-- including a reverence for nature, the continuity of life and death, the fortitude of the human spirit--remind me of the poetry written by an American Civil War volunteer medical attendant named Walt Whitman who, in Leaves of Grass, envisioned a pantheistic concept of nature where 'All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses," and in which "to die is different from what anyone supposed." In Graham's "Calaveras Creek," a flawless poem that flows like the very stream it depicts, she describes the flotsam and jetsam carried by the swollen creek, such as fish bones, shells, algae, weeds, "nameless garbage," and, almost incidentally, "a child's swim-trunks gone green." Some objects may be held temporarily by strainers, seeming to resist the current, "but in the end it all pieces down to delta, where land/and water change and change about,/working with the tides, but always/back to sea." There is power in these poems. I recommend them to you highly. Kenneth Hill, Department of Psychology Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia Leader, Waverley Ground Search and Rescue |
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HE WAS WEARING A YELLOW T-SHIRT
We search for childpaths in the woods. Where would he go? Cedars bunch gray and blind with cobwebs. Berries and honeysuckle shoulder up higher than a man. Not a boy. Birds only sing from the tops and edges. Warblers, orioles, flicks of yellow foliage trick the eye. Not a boy. We could be in Transylvania, the Yucatan. Backwoods of a suburb. Where is he? who walked out of his house and down the civilized street and out of the world? * He's finding the way roots pull the red clay over, and quilted creepers: every longbone loosened from its muscle, moving the way stones and twigs do, the intricate small bones of fingers easing out of their joints. By fall it will all be second nature to him, how the blond hairs scatter. When it rains won't matter. Snow melts and runs away, kid-stuff. And spring shoves up a few yellow tatters, flowers that never grew on a stalk.
"rescuers tunneled into a demolished hotel and in what had been the barroom found..."
He couldn't remember how much he'd had before the room went reeling. Sauza never hit him quite that hard but when he woke, everybody including the ceiling was passed out on the floor. He called for beer. The barkeep didn't stir. And so he helped himself to the closest bottle, and then a little more. He finished off the rubia, and then some tinto for its rosy afterglow. It wasn't like he was stealing: the drinks were clearly on the house, and he was way past feeling. They burrowed in through rubble, 15 stories down. A chink in a jammed-tight door revealed this void. And then they heard a moan, a sigh, a snore. Not a bottle had survived; no bar, no barkeep anymore, but only Julio, with a hangover that measured 8.4.
Underwater ripens. Feel the swells that are more than slough-water: earth becomes liquid. At the surface it pearls and wrinkles, changes color, pretends to be sky. But further down- stream eddies lift the bottom, mud holding the bones of fishes, shells and carapace. Nameless garbage. A child's swim-trunks gone green. Algae and weeds. All have their turn at daylight now in the swifter water just below the mirror-face. Some grab at strainers, take on sand; and stay there in the shallows, water-bound and stretched to the current. But in the end it all pieces down to delta, where land and water change and change about, working with the tides, but always back to sea.
Used-up things all end up here on their side, back, heaped under leaves and lawn clippings past the trestle. An evening gown gone at the hip, otherwise blush-pink. A couch sprawling its parts so you couldn't name it. What stinks could be anything. Folks who come here don't bother with burials, book before the cops come. Follow your nose to that peculiar sweetness, the human perfume every lady finally wears. HIKING OLD DOG TO THE ALPINE LAKE
She takes the lead with unaccustomed spryness, remembering this route through sagebrush, bitterbrush, mules-ears drying like so many summers to a lake still blue, sky filtered through runoff snow. Her lungs pump noisy on this once a year hike, the only season this water gathers enough sun for an old dog's joints. You'd never guess, the way she chases sticks in the waves, and we keep on throwing, remembering her a young dog ranging these mountains for a hiker lost, for all the scents of August gone. Finally the old dog sourness washes off and her fetches turn to good dog weariness. And then we take it a slow walk back, holding in so the old lady still can take the lead. So slow, by the time we reach the car, she smells of nothing but drying grasses, lupine and sage.
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