Primitive

Tonight the full moon is a mask
of light, by daylight
the bone of the mask. The sun
comes then to cook us
through our glasses, brown us
in our skin which is a mask
forever empty behind its eyes.

The official history-of-art
admits no masks: Art is all
about eyes. The mask is only
fabric of flesh torn to make
room for the eyes

which are wired to heaven
by a long thin cord.

The reaper sun spreads
ripe seed-heads standing
to aim for the stalk.
What root survives
under soil

in the dark holes
of the mask
which are the eyes?

Memorial For Matthew

See all the cars lined up along the curb,
discharging, now, his family and friends.
Still air whispers, Do not disturb

the boy who swam his way to birth
just three years from this dead-end
date, to find his own way back to earth.

Two Worlds

Chin in hand, newspaper open,
she sits contemplating distant
daily hunger, while not so far away
a girl runs through the market-
place, blood oranges
of the Holy Land.

Taylor Graham

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Email: Taylor Graham

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