Three Poems by Taylor Graham

Bird I Never Saw in Daylight

 

It hit the windshield, changed parabola

of flight.             You braked the car,

ran back.

Great Horned Owl broken

in the ditch. Quite dead.

 

How gently you cradled it

to the trunk. How many lambs like ours

 

disappeared to its talons.

Such a beauty,

you said, folding it in plastic;

placed it in the freezer, prepared

to ship to the museum.

 

Now our windshield

begins its fine-calligraphy fault-

line, a glass

 

trajectory of dawn-dim into bright.

Inside the Hall of Ornithology

           

Owl stares down

from its beaked    mask,

fixed forever-eyes, its voided

breast and fluted bones

     immobilized in flight.

 

 

 

So Many Holidays

 

The streets were flower extravaganzas,

families by truckloads with chickens and pigs –

maybe St. Francis was blessing

while we just followed road-signs as best

we could, strangers in a white

Toyota – vehicle unpretentious in our native

land but outrageous curiosity

in this place where the streets burst crimson

with fragrances nameless in my language.

Our three dogs with their heads

out the windows, inhaling every scent,

capsicum assailing my senses,

a jolt that never weakens with exposure.

A quote kept circling

my memory like traffic in a glorieta,

intricate trajectories of singular

desires, something

about life love, or was it freedom,

release from self or finding

on a day not even designated, no

special calendar date.

Was it today?

 

 

 

Show Me

 

I’ve never seen a Horned Puffin – this image in the birdbook. But loons, on a stormy Kenai summer lake thundering the water. Not seen so much as heard, the hard splat of waves on canoe, our young dog guarding the bow. We paddled for anything like shore, the tiniest island. Incredible generosity of dogs and loons in an all night storm. The quality of light sulphur-ionic, dark till daylight. What the earth reveals and hides. Some mornings I wake up feeling like a horned crone – this image in the mirror. What do the eyes know? Without a sound, loons still call, more haunting than wild geese. In the lens behind my eye a dog long dead looks back over her shoulder, making sure I follow; if I’ll believe; tell her “Show me!”

 

 

 

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, 2012) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest book is What the Wind Says (Lummox Press, 2013), poems about living and working with her canine search partners over the past 40 years.