Two Poems

Taylor Graham

Idea

It’s dark-thirty in the morning,
you’re sitting on the porch
wide to the night wind

sipping hot coffee
listening.
It isn’t thunder-

weather, not quite, but
upcanyon, there’s a black rush
like runoff, caffeine in the veins.

All week you’ve been flat
on the couch,
not caring one way or

the other.
Now something
you can’t wrap a name around.

Maybe the Old Trickster’s
got you
sharp and wild.

You know how dangerous
thoughts can be.
The mind in the flesh

of man
both meat and carnivore.
This Idea has claws

and talons.
By daylight like Coyote
it slips away.

Orpheus After Earthquake

		Mexico City 1985

The two of you divided
as the building’s

torn, a garment
lintel-dark with possibility
of collapse. If Moon
conjuncts Sun just so, light

strikes the underside of arch,
it splits
like the stones of Shapur
(how many time zones/millennia away?)
the 16 stories of a low-wage 
factory, a flight
of size 8 shirtwaists

down uncountable
smashed stairs.
Who sings the sewing machine
as it resonates with last

night’s kisses or this
very morning’s dance of a dry
lake-bed? As if
she still were dancing
in her chair.

Pigeons pecking for a soul
can’t find it
flown. The song is that
interval of blood the ceiling

bleeds or the living breeze
through a shattered window.
Opening, this lightless
mouth, your song.

You climb back out
on your two good metered
legs your lyric lungs,
her silence.