Taylor Graham

The Universe Next Door

Look, there’s King David, clear
as life – no, touched
with a lavender haze of distance.
He must have stepped across
on a harp-string
from one plane to another.

You don’t believe in another
universe, where the Psalmist king
plucks his harp for a bunch
of business travelers surprised
to wear white robes?

You call this fanciful, mere 
imagination? How do you suppose 
mankind achieved flight?
Think of Leonardo, his fine-
frenzy invention; and now 

we’ve got 757s. 
Was it King David 
whispering – as if through 
a membrane-thin wall,
a wireless line – 

to one of those guys 
on Flight 93 
the words of his Psalm,
that caused the plane to crash 
right through
to the next universe.

Dicotyledon

The two of us 
furling flags, semaphores 
dark-translucent 
before a storm – sudden 
incandescence
through clouds, photo-
moment for a mind that tries
to keep such things tightly 
rolled and labeled.

How many parts 
to a horse?
A newborn foal is all crooks 
and angles, trembling
to its knees, its hooves
too tiny and perfect 
to bear.
As if it were dancing.

At night we fit 
in such small dark spaces
but the mind flies out of its
definitions, amorphous bat
hunting a vector-
course, weaving thin air 
of air –
to arrive back
at a window opening 
as a young girl wakes up

never so pretty as when she was 
dancing, and after, 
leaning breathless against 
the wall, 
head lolled back, eyes blank
seeing herself with
her self dancing.

Effigies

What strange convection sent these things so high?
A small child’s secrets, wishes on a distant cloud.
And then, like divers plummeting from sky
or flying castles, they come floating down,
a drift of dolls as speechless as a dream.
In pleats and puckers, each with smiling face,
they plunge to catch on wires or limbs of trees,
to hang by skirt or hair or bits of lace

until a shiver comes, a hint of want,
some grownup’s whimsy to be tall and thin.
It shakes them from whatever sleep they haunt,
these vinyl spirits stuffed inside a skin
that shrinks as if idealized too small. 
A girl will reach to grasp them as they fall.

Trying to Paint a Redhead

Imagine a solar system
with every pigment
at your brush-tip.
You fall in love
with the entire palette.

But red!
The way sun through a window
catches single hairs in tresses
of a girl you’ll never 
see again.

They used to burn redheads
as witches.
They say the gene for red hair
may become extinct
within a hundred years.

In your studio
this morning,
only an empty coffee cup,
the ashtray,
her incendiary smile.