No cavalier, not mounted
at all, but I remember a horse's
passing. Its tail-wind
tangled my hair.

In the uplift of mountains,
I'm the tortoise with a bungalow
on my back, gazing into the red-
rock canyon of my life,
dizzy with blue air.

I've never been a scanned copy
of my identity.

But I scan the clouds
that heap and swirl over peaks
I've never climbed.
I list them in the roll of ages.

I walk bow-legged from riding
the names of weather.

In time I'll be a rock
in the trail, a juniper still
standing, long after it's
struck by lightning.
 
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Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. She's included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, is winner of this year's Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press.
E-mail: piper at innercite dot com
More information on Taylor Graham's new book
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