Taylor Graham

One Small Paw Print

for Raven

Her ears were wings unfolding as for flight when she was old enough—tired of earth, its life, its unquenched yearning after light. So close she still was to her fact of birth. We loved her promise of ancestral heart, her mother’s yen for wandering. And yet, herself was mystery, an unplotted start. We’d read it in her eyes of glister-jet. What could she know, still bumble-legs, a pup achieving balance on the stairs, and game to try the next adventure, head-tilt up— each morning new and nothing quite the same— We saw her leave us, looking straight ahead, ears like wings as out of sight they led.

Taylor Graham

Taylor Graham

Improvising on the Keys

“It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old.” – Wendell Berry

A lady browsing the art gallery pauses to gaze at it—my old manual typewriter, with poet typing, is an oddity. Composing by pounding the keys is hard, it takes strong fingers to make imprint on paper, to have something to show for the effort; to have something worth saving. A poem on Hope the lady wants. On the wall behind me is the photo of a hawk; it soars, eyes focused ahead. Hope, I remember, is the thing with feathers—the hawk focused harder, no doubt, by its hunger. Hope is hunger, as I’ve come to believe, a necessity. You have your own notions about hope, growing of their own accord inside you. Hope is never old.

Aspen Quake

We climbed through lodgepole for a tiny lake, on the map a blue splotch like blotted ink, a sweaty hike—the rhythm of give and take

of breath, a pause to let some detail sink past conscious thought, its surface ripple pool. We reached a leveling, a gentle brink—

imagine angel wing-beat soft and cool all breezy green of aspen quiver-leaves. At water’s edge we camped, a granite stool,

a stony bed. The midnight mind believes such things: stars over-watch a trick-knee’s ache mummy-bagged on rock, and breeze relieves

the wakefulness. Mute murmur of lake and angel wings or was it aspen-quake?

Taylor Graham