To Stay
Dusty thistle-brittle fields in need
of a windmill; weeds.
You think of hills, but these
are pimples on a flat face
without trees to plume and stream
the way the winds go.
Wherever you look is nothing
but horizon, a picket-
fence of vanishing points.
Nothing aims a way out,
no gentle compass of a breeze.
Everlasting wind from invisible
mountains crumbling to this
place where you belong.
When The 1st Seed Catalog Comes
All winter
we burn trash on the garden,
accumulating ashes:
old magazines, drafts of letters,
cereal boxes, packaging.
Earth too hard for digging,
the compost pile
gets egg shells, potato peelings,
piths and rinds and coffee grounds.
One dead squirrel the dogs delivered
home.
Spring is that
simple day
we turn things under:
soil so rich and brown
we forget what makes it sweet
and speak of seeds
as a beginning.
© 2002 Taylor Graham
I'm a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. My latest chapbook, This Morning According to Dog, is a collection of dog and cat poems. My poems have appeared or are forthcoming in America, The Christian Science Monitor, The Iowa Review, Poetry International, Yankee, 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse and elsewhere.