Taylor Graham

" I’m a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also help my husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. In addition to Gypsy, my poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and I’m included in the new anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004)".

 

HOW MEMORY WORKS

A cry, but wordless,

stretched across Easter waters

as if reaching up for air.

Everything else is colors and aroma.

Camellias crimson against white

garden walls. A wrought-iron gate

and seven shades of green

beneath a marble saint. Scent of

garlic and fresh bread. Fish

stacked silver-plated

in the market stalls. Sailboats

dancing with small waves.

On all sides, lavender mountains,

as if the afternoon were caught

in a bowl.

Only the cry

doesn’t fit. Wordless

among so many foreign tongues.

It sounded like “help.”

Granite in memory

like someone drowning.

OLDER THAN THE NEWS

If you come with clipboard and camera

seeking “just the facts”

(the latest hurricane’s evacuation;

a pavilion booby-trapped to explode;

unseasonable drought, or flood;

the price of soybeans, or who’s leading

in the primaries)

if you ask your questions and only listen

for the answers, you might just miss

that old man in the corner

(it’s human interest if he’s blind)

who plucks one chord

on something that looks like a lyre,

then gazes off beyond his eyes

to what you’ll never catch

on film.