1 minute read
Taylor Graham
Taylor Graham
Live Fast and Die Young
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“Climate change may make trees live fast and die young” –Adam Vaughn in Environment
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of town— go north, young ponderosa pine, young oak,
or learn to fly your seed like thistledown. Climate change moves too fast for rooted folk.
The ancient trees are falling as we speak, so now we plant saplings from way down south.
Can they adapt to jetlag, learn to eke out brief life-cycles from disaster’s mouth?
PG&E cut down our mountain pine young, graceful, aspiring to stately form,
for fear the tree might fall across their line sparking conflagration—our new-found norm.
What is a world without our breathing trees, sweet birdsong boughs in a green leafy breeze?
Día de los Muertos
–a paradigm
How do the dead live? Marigolds, a framed photo.
What music is this? Fado of longing, mariachi of brave joy.
Ofrendas bright as farmers market of harvest— dead sister, grandson, generations in memory. Now he lights incense, blesses, purifies the skull of a faithful dog, wraps it in spotless linen to carry it with him home.
The scene is dreamlike as if seen through human tears— a woman closes eyes, cradles her lips around the tones of La Llorona.
Beat of native drums and the skeleton dancers keep its dark deep pulse— dancing with sun-gold feathers flying at forearm and knee.
Dancer whirls and stomps, drops to his knees and rises— a bird’s hollow bones.
Taylor Graham
Your Echocardiogram
A flashlight illuminates clouds on a dark river tiding underground, at times reflecting red neon then blue, then white on black again. Silence. An audible glub at intervals. The surface light-show cloaks who-knows what depths. Stormdrain suddenly exposed in an unknown town where we’ ve been living all these years. A tech draws figures on the screen as if to bridge or bank the tide. Dark water finds a grid—an oval of woven wire, field-fence to keep our sheep at pasture— disappearing into deep-dark water under clouds or foam, illusion of searching for a young boy drowned beyond the canny of a dog’ s nose. At last the image soothes, a single light post rippling like a signal-beam from shore. Only the doctor will say what it means.
