USA

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SEEING YOU OFF
[at Placerville airstrip]

After watching two-seaters
ease against their tie-downs,
staring eyeless windowed
at a world of drop-offs
under cloud;

after so long listening for
the mounting drone
that isn't weather but
is always weather's child;
after I asked again "have you
forgotten?" -- as if counting
pills and socks and shorts
could anchor you as far as Monday;

after tasting a thirst in the windsock heat
but not daring turn away
from watching sky,
how it measures, seamless, our horizons,
so I swallowed and denied
the thirst;

after thinking
this waiting wouldn't end:

a dark cross buzzed and circled overhead,
tilted its wings, dropped down,
took you.
Then the drone screamed,
rose and circled,
banked away shrinking.

I begin the wait.

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

Merlin has always known the secrets
and revealed only what he thought wise.
Arthur was a goose, but not afraid.

But now the men of science (god!)
without leave are latching on to this
and that tag-end of a chromosome,

the Frankenstein of cloning. A man
(they say) could live almost forever
and then at last divide and multiply

and linger on like a well-maintained
Edsel. By this modern alchemy, any
man can become 18k fool's gold.

Merlin is too old, his wand withered.
He checks out this afternoon at Ralph's
and rolls his cart along the curb

as far as the freeway on-ramp. Don't
wonder what's in the grocery basket.
Don't ask which exit. Merlin

is westbound now, his mind a map,
a sail, a shrunken skin, a coracle
to ferry an old mortal off to Avalon.

SLEEPING WITH THE MOCKINGBIRD

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.


first appeared in Red Rock Review (1999)

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