Tornado

Last night Mercury
left his mythical mirrors
all over town, cracked.

Waiting for Stars

From his braided rug, the old dog
sniffs out evening with a poet’s nose.
Open every window, let the west-breeze
blow. A dog’s eyes draw invisible worlds
his four-foot lopings in reflection,
his long grass-rollings under sun,
his afternoons so close to earth.
From his braided rug, now, the old dog
goes chasing stars in his sleep.
Look, there’s Sirius.

Insomnia

Listen to water in the pipes, so high-pitched
like the wind nagging, and a hint of thunder
gravelly and inarticulate. Who could sleep?
The old dog on his circuits, a grave reader
of the hours, slips to your bedside, retreats,
repeats what animals all know of sleep.
And now the cat's a purr against your knee.
The dog paces the hall, checking locks,
then circles by the door and plops to sleep.
But Night just rides its elevator, calling off
the floors. Eleven, twelve, thirteen o'clock
fourteen-fifteen and still you're not asleep.
Now comes the replay of bad dreams, wide awake.
You've been here before, you know how it feels
to be helpless as if finally drugged to sleep
by pills dissolving, chalk-white as a Milky Way
all swirling down. The toilet flushes and
the pipes draw out their drum-song, go to sleep.

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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