RELIC

The puppy’s got
the currycomb
again, his bright
new teeth inter-
locked with rusty
metal; red-chipped
enamel chewed
from the handle.

Our fault. We left
it lie within his
reach. Now he
expects a scold,
he knows we’ll take
the toy away

that’s not a toy,
that tastes like
the grandsire
he never knew,
his own mother,
generations of
shed dog-hair,
DNA that locks him
to himself by blood-
lines out of memory.

Who owns it, any-
way? We only keep
this tool
to comb out old
dead hair.


HERE

Just off the freeway
in chaparral-scrub hills
my dog tells me, Stop Here.

He leads the way
past a dead-end barricade
down a sandy gulch
to a creek that ought to be dry
this time of year.

But here, water finds
a falling way over rocks,
the shallows shadowed green
with mint. Along the banks,
sycamore and willow.

For years I’ve passed by
at the speed limit,
without seeing what’s been
always here.


MR. SHAKESPEARE

Last night in a whisper of dream
I recognized your voice,
midwestern flat, no overtone,

holding back the blank-
verse rush against a line. Entrance.
You strode an Old Globe stage

while you chalked the blackboard,
sketching in the blanks
of our 10th grade imagination.

Cavalier Elizabethan black, the King
to Miss Lyon’s Kate
in that willing

suspension of disbelief
that clears a stage of actors
for the final curtain.

Exeunt.
Red pencil.
Gone.



© Taylor Graham
piper@innercite.com

Bio: 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, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her newest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, will appear in August as winner of the 2005 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press. Her website is http://somersetsunset.net/Poetry.htm.