AGAINST THE GRAY

At her desk she writes.
All week the agents of gloom
have occupied the hilltops,
where a herald should be
trumpeting spring. Nothing
dissipates their dull eyes.

She tries to filigree words
across the blank page,
but her fingers hurt.
A cloven pen-stroke. Age
admits no fantasy.

“Don’t worry about the dark,”
she writes. “Address the fog.”
The ancient mist of myth
is dew in an April garden
where young girls dance
forever in their silly,
oh, their very lovely veils.



PLANTINGS

So many gaps in her letters
from one blood test to the next,
ellipses like rough rows
of seeds...

The wild rabbits are in heaven.
What used to be her garden-
gate’s a-gape for lack
of fixing...

worries about the immune-
defenses, balance of medications,
each opening
doctor’s door like a brick-

wall across her calendar
just trying to get from one
appointment to the
next... she longs for when

nothing but squash and tomatoes
grew from her plantings,
a life’s harvest, she writes,
and then

so many ellipses
one sentence to the next...
You try to
fill in the gaps.


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, who also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and is included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004).