USA

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THE OLD-TOWN CEMETERY

A graveside angel smiles but could not
fit that curve of lip to his trumpet
to make stone music. Dumb marble.
Some of the chiseled dates are wrong.

To the east, the woods give up to June
in curlicues of creeper, honeysuckle,
woodbine, a fetid scent of green and hot
white buzz of flies. Marble sweats.

Tombstones tell you nothing, anything.
Dates lie like history. Avery Stoke
rode a horse with a short stride, but
he got here anyway. They all did,

summer, winter, spring. A Daws child
buried at four. Everyone has ancestors
here or somewhere else. Visitors talk
sotto voce, acting invisible. Nobody

believes in ghosts. But passing by,
they curtsy to the humid angel, whisper
dates that aren’t their own. They step
careful as if blind red clay remembered.

Not dates or names, this sodden green
mid-summer, nor how the gravestones
lie. It's only a dumb trumpet angel
in stone. Everybody knows its name.

SHE TAKES THE DOG
AND SAYS GOODBYE

Slam the door and twist
the key. Floor it.
Then ease up, crank
into the turn. Too fast.
The wheels kick gravel,
the old dog, unattached,
sails off the pickup-bed
to roadside berm.
He lands feet-first.
Well, shoot,
she's got to stop
for an old dog limping
along behind.

She
should be so tough
or flexible, or just
refusing to be
bruised.

A mile behind her now,
that old dog's master
licks at sores
and calls some names
and waits for her
inevitable
return.

BLACKBERRIES

Daylight deepens into black-
berry, the brambles breathing in
August, breathing out late July.
It slips as slow as sand.

On the porch your sister rocks
and fans and stares out
into evening, wishing. Someday
it will be December, May, a year

from now, the time an after-
taste of blackberry recalls
an evening already gone dark
with time, just waiting.

BONES, TRAVELING

They were headed somewhere
when the flesh failed.
By the shape of scapula
I’m guessing deer.
On a burned-dry slope, rip-gut
brome and foxtails, these bones
must be sneaking down the swale
when no one’s looking,
while cattle prod for grass
with flat noses. In their way
these bones are sniffing
for a small wet trickle, sump,
a damp against the tongue
that isn’t anymore, a green
grown forever.

POWER-OUT

We sit in a triptych of light,
a coal-oil lantern and two candles,
their flames quietly gothic in the dark.
You’re reading a history of war.
I look up from a page of poems
to watch, outside the window,
dependable daylight guttering
toward dusk, a dim suffusing snow
that falls and genuflects
the ponderosa boughs.
Somewhere beyond our sight
the storm has rapped and struck
our power dumb. And now,
inside as well as out, it’s dark
except for whatever light,
between us, we can make.

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