 Harmonics from the back cover: In Harmonics, Taylor Graham maps the precarious. She reminds us: "A plate shifts under ocean, not intending much..." but "a wall falls down." Roads vanish in winter storms, friends disappear. Someone takes "a mis-step/on the South Fork Trail/ and it's forever." We're warned by a voice that knows from experience: "Don't step on broken branches,/you never know whose bones." The poems' response to such a world is dire attentiveness---an essential listening so acute it registers when a spider's web "resonates like highrise steel/inside its concrete." Though pervaded with a sense of elegy, the poems also celebrate the redemptive moment: A cloud of butterflies "balanced on the tips of nameless, pale pink flowers." They usher us into the minds of Fox, Bear and Dog, from whom we learn: "A dog writes his own history/without monuments." These are deceptively humble poems. Graham speaks to us casually, at times with quiet good humor; like a good neighbor chatting across the back fence. But Graham's crafting is deft, her sense of the line edgy, architectural and sure. These poems sing with the music of the inevitable. ~Susan Kelly-DeWitt
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A spider's web resonates like highrise steel inside its concrete. The web snaps as one man steps under interlacing twigs of forest, not lost but simply walking. A plate shifts under ocean not intending much of anything, maybe only stretching, and a wall falls down. Listen. An old brown Navajo sings heaven and clay as she weaves these colors into dust. Creation's song is a trapped insect, imploding stars or earthquake. We weave ourselves into its pattern, right or wrong.
I was sleeping when they came. I slept in the savor of pot roast, the woolish warmth of wood‑stove, and the long night=s moon measuring my dreams.
But in the morning I found their prints stitching the old orchard, circling each tree. They lifted bear‑bulk for the hanging apples, the ones too poor to pick.
And so I reached, too, and plucked just one, and bit it to its seeds. The flesh was sweet but scant. It tasted like hunger.
All your married friends love cheatin' - songs. Unattached, you lean to trespass. You've got this rough brown dog who travels shotgun, both county road and interstate, muzzle wide out the right-side window, no matter weather. Stop here! he says in Dog, then ranges out through some- body's unattended sag-fence field gone crazy to anise, mustard blossoming yellow among the faded Miller cans and rabbit droppings. A good dog leaves his own. Once your tail-lights disappear around the next curve west, the only evidence will be this lush forge of wild radish at a certain spot he marked, thrusting flowers delicately blue-white as moth wings, a flight that's never lighted on a question of ownership.
Under hot sky and the livestock trucks headed for mountain pasture; under the speeding convertibles bound for Valley cities, under the bridge where swallows daub their nests with creek‑mud and zap mosquitos above thin water
on a dry‑grass slope across from the tanglefoot‑garden where a forgotten hand sowed mock‑orange and yellow monkey‑flower, and blue‑ birds weave a nest of honey‑ suckle bark---
here under a plain June sun stands Fox
in sable fur with ruddy prick ears, unstartled eyes staring at me staring back at Fox
unafraid as Eden taking my human picture naming me.
for Steve
Eight summers since you rode that load of timber down a July so hot, the asphalt burned like failed brakes. At your neck, the weight of forest that you loved to measure out by footsteps, losing track of hours when you weren't so needy after pay that runs out at the end of logging season.
It was trees you loved, and meadow that springs back underfoot hardly leaving a track. You'd puzzle out a cougar pad or follow cloven hooves, just to see an August thicket from a buck's eye. You liked to sniff the deadfall scent that stays on south‑face slopes when everybody else is counting days till the flat‑broke end of season.
Of course they milled your logs--- the ones they could salvage--- measured out by board‑feet. Your truck's a total. The part of you they saved lies in a well‑milled box. That part can wait.
This morning I was hiking above the last bad curve. I almost thought I saw your footprint. |