Taylor Graham
Taylor Graham Poems
Between a mossy outcrop
and a bedrock mortar.
I watch a neighbor’s wood-smoke rise
toward the contrail
...
She takes the lead with unaccustomed
spryness, remembering this route
through sagebrush, bitterbrush,
mules-ears drying like so many summers
...
Her wedding picture’s with the recipes
for meatloaf. Months before Mother died
she saved this lock, but kept unmatching keys.
...
The tooth fairy in her necklace
of teeth, and tooth earrings
and a gown as shimmery as spit,
takes them from underneath
...
The day begins with a speckled fawn
in the swale;
and then, five swallows —
one of them fledged from your hand.
...
I was sleeping when they came.
I slept in the savor of pot roast,
the woolish warmth of wood-stove,
and the long night’s moon measuring
...
Yosemite Valley
Granite walls sing their own music, if you could hear it.
Perhaps it’s written on the staff of contour lines
...
We cup our hands around the possibility
of fire. Frost has nipped our ankles, touched a hunger
at the dug-up root. Headless roses can’t explain
...
The boy without eyeglasses
stumbles over his father’s thrift.
He might be a fool dancing
out of wildwood,
...
No matter how good you try to be,
you’re bound to be subpoenaed
sometime, for something.
...
On the Scott St. overpass, on the east-
side parapet, a rainbow touches down
on the woman walking in her thrift-
...
Coyotes weave the ridge with polyphonic
song. They call our cat.
She loves the bones of small night creatures
skittering their hunger dances in the dark.
...
Of the hottest she chose
the hottest: chiles
that made her Texas Ranger
blanch, come up for air, “Oh yes!
...
The old dog plays bass.
We used to call it chasing rabbits,
but she’s grown
...
We agree on this,
it’s never been so gray.
The sky won’t rain.
The concrete entrance drive,
...
The old man stares ahead, no reason why.
The cat’s stretched sunning on the kitchen sill,
and now a flight of crows across the sky.
...
I’m feeling light-headed dreamy
when he calls me
Querida, so I hardly wonder
how he can do that “d” that sounds
...
The anger comes out through the fingers,
these threads forced through fabric,
the needle’s prick.
...
How many light-years till a star’s shine
reaches us in our earthly darkness?
All the men-in-black have made their living
by our blindness.
...
you map the backside of the moon
using blips just broken off from dreams,
and hints and winks from the sly tipped face
at its palest quarter.
...
Taylor Graham Biography
Taylor Graham was born Judith Ann Taylor in Pasadena, CA in 1944; her mother was a public health nurse, her father a doctor. Her first love was her Morgan mare, Molly B. After she was introduced to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at Wm. S. Hart high school in Newhall, poetry became her passion. She studied languages in college, got a masters in comparative literature at USC, was a Fulbright Scholar at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat in Freiburg, Germany. She was a Woodrow Wilson scholar working for her doctorate when she met and married Hatch Graham, a forester and wildlife biologist; she had enrolled in his night class in wildlife management at San Jacinto Community College in Gilman Hot Springs. He couldn't understand how anyone could consistently get 100% on his exams. Hatch was reassigned to the US Forest Service's Alaska Planning Team in 1972. Judy Taylor Graham gave up her academic career as the couple moved to Anchorage, AK. It was here the Grahams got their German Shepherd puppy Kerry, which led to a long avocation of search and rescue dog training. With like-minded dog owners, they formed a canine search and rescue (SAR) unit called D.O.G.S. (Dogs Organized for Ground Search) , training in avalanche and lost person rescue. At this time, Judy Taylor Graham was also a stringer for Copley News Service, writing on Alaskan affairs. Through Forest Service transfers to the Washington DC Headquarters, the San Francisco Regional Office, and the El Dorado National Forest in Placerville, CA, Grahams were members of Virginia Search and Rescue Dog Assn. (VSRDA) , DOGS-East (VA & MD) , WOOF (Wilderness Finders - CA) , and CARDA (CA Rescue Dog Assn) . Judy Taylor Graham founded and edited a newsletter for Sheriffs and dog handlers under the auspices of the National Assn for Search and Rescue (NASAR) . The newsletter, SAR Dog ALERT, reported nationwide on canine SAR activities. She was editor for eleven years and received NASAR'S Service Award in 1988. With her husband, she became a staff writer for DogSports magazine for SAR. They both contributed to NASAR's Response magazine. In 1992 SAR Dog ALERT was nominated for national recognition by the Dog Writers' of America, and in 1993 she received NASAR's Honorary Angel of the High Lonesome award. For much of this time, her poetry was on hold. In 1991, she published 'Looking for Lost.' And the poetry has flowed ever since. About her book 'Casualties, ' Dr. Kenneth Hill, Professor of Psychology at St. Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, wrote: 'It occurred to me only after I began to read these poems how rarely the themes of search and rescue are expressed in poetry. While indeed there is much verse about poor sinners gone spiritually astray, Taylor Graham is the only poet I know of who writes about people who are quite literally lost. So, for example, there are poems here about children who follow their dogs too deeply into the forest, foolish cavers who can't find their way back to the surface, and senile men and women wandering aimlessly in their ‘personal fogs.’ As well, there are also poems about the other kinds of casualties we look for: drowned swimmers, fallen climbers, suicides, runaways, and victims of earthquake, avalanche, flood, and murder..... There is power in these poems. I recommend them to you highly.” In 2005 her book 'The Downstairs Dance Floor' was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize by Texas Review Press. Poems from her chapbooks are found on her website www.somersetsunset.net She is included in the anthology 'California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, ' edited by Gioia, Yost, & Hicks. Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently commented on her poetry to a reporter for the Sacramento Bee. 'Graham has worked outside the official world of poetry, and she has never been given anything like the attention she deserves.... Although her independence has cost her external honors in the back-slapping, favor-trading world of Po-Biz, it has also given her the clarity and freedom to write as no one else can manage.' For the past four years, Graham has been immersed in a project to portray one of the greatest humanitarians of the nineteenth century, Elihu Burritt, in poetry. The result is 'Walking with Elihu: poems on Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith.' Self-published through CreateSpace, an Amazon company, it is now available through Amazon.com/books.)
The Best Poem Of Taylor Graham
Listening Post
Between a mossy outcrop
and a bedrock mortar.
I watch a neighbor’s wood-smoke rise
toward the contrail
of a transcontinental flight.
Two overwintered bluebirds
peck berries from the mistletoe of a dying oak
whose roots dig into frost-heave,
decomposing granite re-composing
tree and shadow.
Atop a boulder, a squirrel has eaten
half a mushroom-cap and left the rest.
Coyote scat is full of manzanita berries
and fur, fragments of bone: what’s
left of gray squirrel.
I imagine I could hear the earth turn
its worms through soil, or maybe
that’s blood running rabbit-trails
in my ears, or else
news on the breeze
from ridges up-east and over.
I stand listening, till it’s time
to go back home.
Can I find a space there
to store this quiet?
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