USA

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AFTER SURGERY

Ridgetop soil, concrete foundation.
Cellar with its boxed remembrances
and sorted nails, its hammers strung
on the south wall.  Insulation
where the bats hang by daylight
and streak out in dark formation
in the gray silk dusk.  Girders,
joists and subfloor.  Hardwood oak
of the family room radiating
from a cast-iron stove.  You and I
in chairs.  And in the midst
atop the floorboards, a ragged
round of carpet, a mattress
with two cast-off sleeping bags,
a worn-out blanket.  The old dog's
chin, his tall soft ears at rest
ajar.  His long shaved back
with staples down the spine.
The eyes he doesn't close,
for fear of such another
solitary sleep.

BEHIND THE VICARAGE

Dark flowers are falling through the night
as if they could cover up the generations
of canon, white-elephant bazaars, a rumored
murder, the dusty forgetfulness of attics.
In an upstairs bed, on simple velocity
of sleep, one boy rides an ancient armada
to a new raw world, a coast without a village
or steeple, a land without map or language.
And after the old tall ships sail back home
at daybreak, not a single man leaves prints
along this shoreline, so far from his own
unrecovered boyhood.

WAITING ROOM

This is the way to sit
when your husband disappears
behind the blinded door
and the traffic on the street approaches
whooshes then diminishes
in unequal waves of gears and
then the waver of a siren out of sight
and a faint voice comes
invisible from somewhere
and departs, and a fainter breeze
disturbs the liquid amber leaves and
begonias in a planter
shuffling shadows, and a car starts,
shifts and goes away,
and still you sit and watch
or do not watch the clock, but feel
your breath unmoving in your lungs.
Your lips practice words for listen
while no sound comes, and
the air tastes like metal.
Put down your intentions
like a magazine with a missing
page.  Become the page.

IN THIS DARK OF THE YEAR

One star bends down: no earthquake, but
geometry and physics tell secrets
beyond earshot.  Eyes long hoped-
for appear unpromised in a hall mirror,
tongues that sing in spite of
words: sweets seeping through
closed doors.  Candles reach for
the match, to know how light
presses darkness till it explodes
in galaxies.  

© All Copyright, 2000, Taylor Graham. 
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.