An Hour in the
Cougar's Grace
From the back cover:
Taylor Graham has been published in America, The Chatahoochee Review, The Iowa Review, New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Yankee, and elsewhere. Her collection, Casualties: search-and-rescue poems (Coal City, 1995) was profiled in the 1998 Poet's Market. Her most recent collection, Next Exit, was released by Cedar Hill Publications in 1999. Taylor and her husband are volunteer search-and-rescue dog handlers in the Sierra Nevada.
Front cover art by Bryan Dechter, our nephew. More at www.dancingeyes.com
He sings in the voices of people
I've lost. Mother, father, one
old lover. Friends, some gone
without my noticing. He changes
dialect. He improvises,
he brings them back.
But his song
is of people disappearing, a mock-
masked carnival, a chorus of dead
voices masquerading in a mocker
song.
This same familiar room fades
into twilight. Outside
a bird reminds me of forgotten
voices
until he takes my own
voice too, and scats it so I
wouldn't recognize, and goes on
improvising song on song on song.
All night she hunts,
black by the light of her two
green moons. Come dawn
it's stubblefield silver,
bleach and gossamer
of grasses drying.
She stalks the edges
shedding sunlight. See
the weed-heads parting,
a scatter of birds.
By noon she's purring
adventure against my leg,
her tail a triumph
of thistledown, come-alongs
and burrs.
Toward evening
she grooms and preens
in my lap, as if
she were domestic,
as if she were mine.
But it's all glossed off
by midnight to that deep
eclipsing shine.
We're a month into knee-high
vetch, gigantic poppies
on the roadsides in this maze of small
dirt roads. 74 years old and lost,
this April, who walks all day every
day, her mind not keeping pace
with her tennis shoes along
the gravel of an edgy
neighborhood between pavement
and dropoff canyon, every day less
certain where she's going:
a house she used to live in
10 miles down the highway,
a pond she favored on a hot
spring day with a dog
for company and spring thoughts
of her own.
Two grown daughters tell us
everything they know about a mother
who's no longer anyone they know:
how tall, how light
she stands now in faded jeans
and tennies. How far
she can walk.
And so we're walking calling April,
who could be anywhere in poison-
oak and lupine, this April
on an April afternoon,
as if she'd come to our call.
A pair of city lovers
off the road: he
stands guard against our foothill
bandits, while in floral-pattern
skirt and shoes rubbed smooth
by pavement, she gathers
armloads of poppies, of lupine.
She's tripping back
to stuff them in the car.
May they take their blue thievery
back to town. May she
for the day wear lupine
wilting in her hair.
But they can't take the hills,
every day going wilder
with flowers.
Shriner Lake, Mokelumne Wilderness
Lying uncomfortable
in my bones, I heard you
drop to sleep, mounded dense as earth
in your bag.
Three miles from trail-
head, two in the morning.
No wind
but something's whispering
soft as a child
breathing. Moonlight
flits an edge of lace,
undergarment for an angel.
Over the aisle of trees
it watches me through lodgepole,
measuring an arc against my hours.
There are others, motionless
in fir. One keeps the prints
of deer, and one has flushed out
nighthawks. No wind. But
an angel's settling dust
in the tracks we made
to get here.
Each one invisible
except for moonlight.
Have they crossed your dreams?
I shiver under the hand
of the one without a name.
And then the angel of sudden joy
shakes me as I'm waking
in its way.