Taylor Graham

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.

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.

_____

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her current project is Walking with Elihu, poems on the American Peace activist Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith (1810~1879).