Subway

You've passed through station after station
with the one thought in your head,
an unchanging scenery under the changing
never-changing city full of thoughts
which are the names of people censussed
and uncountable, and some already gone.
You'd recognize this one from any angle,
whether in paisley or a plaid, with hair
the color of molasses, moving that sulfur-
sweet and slowly, and then like the right
train she's gone. Through all the stations
you can't remember just where you were
going or how to get there, or the name
of this metropolis - - your face blank
like passengers on a train.

Arts

We've used the last of mother's hot
Eisley peppers, a pucker of remembrance,
how many summers gone. Dad's dead,
his carved and painted decoys drift
in the pond of cellar, dry.
Jason's gone to join the ballet
How he danced the staircase,
the open roof under stars.

You've gone to gardening, I to words,
our separate addictions. Evenings,
we watch bits of opera by satellite,
bolero, chateaux of the Loire,
open-mouthed as if they held a secret
from us. All you can do is make
something of yourself.

The X-Axis

In her citron silks
an uncanny geisha threads
moonshine corridors,
the tortured turnings
of everything you wish
might be.

Outside the window, risky
necklaces of morning
traffic horns, ungraceful
braking, smash and
sirens, morgue
of peaceless rest.

Does truth lie in the swirl
of perfumed silks and
eyes behind a fan like
stars, or in the patient
curtained passage
of black cars?

^

Biography

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada of California. Her poetry appears in The Iowa Review, Free Lunch, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. Her latest collection is An Hour in the Cougar's Grace (Pudding House, 2000). She was previously published in EA8.