The More I Learn About The Wind...

—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF MAGIC?



See this wet-mop hung out to dry?


Look closely. Just a mop.


Now see this basin of water—


once-used salvage-water from the shower,


nothing more. Inspect it carefully.


Just water.


But now I dunk my mop in the basin,


Abracadabra, here’s a frog!


Isn’t that magic?


That’s what a dried-up pond

will do, will drive the frogs of drought


to a mop in search of water.


Magic! how he hops—no, a dancer’s leap


on wings of amphibious legs—


from basin to kitchen floor, and out


the deck-door, still in search


of green and a decent pond of water.

_____________________

THE DRAGON’S PROGRESS

You can smell it on the air.
No wind to disperse the smoke,
or float ash our way.
You chart the fire’s progress—
flames still distant,
but no promises.
How many canyons over?
How decadent the woods in need
of thinning, how tinder-dry
the chaparral.
*
Smoke fills the valley,
curls in canopies of oak, every corner
and corridor. I’ve got smoke in my shoes
and smoke in my head.
It smells of dragon breath
on the manzanita trail where I walked
in a sepia cloud;
over the rim of burned-out hills,
where my dog tested the air
that smelled like nothing could survive
but chimneys—the headstones
of houses.
It’s how you smelled, coming home
after a week of trying to save
a forest; trees in skeleton
on that ridge we used to hike—
where fireweed pushed up
through char the dragon left behind;
its seeds still alive. 

TRICKS OF LIGHT



Air draws around us yellow and thick


as a comforter. The sun blood-orange  


stares down, aloof as hope for autumn.


Hot dry summer fog of distant fires—


smoke—the sky swallows our earth


in clouds, air so thick and yellow


in the lungs, we breathe light burning


its way closer to home. This insistence


of light. Last year’s ashes lie as if dead


in the wood-stove, waiting for a wind.  


_____________________

IT’S GONE



That useless acre,


once a place for making mortar,


abandoned—just ruins


where tarweed bloomed end-of-summer yellow


in the dry-weed fields


and the heat-hush of July gave way to shivers


from the pits,


the free-standing walls—bones


of a white fortress, a place to play at rescue


from the mine, setting loose the prisoner


out of time;


for never-grownup dreams


of dungeons, high adventure,


danger—


a safety hazard 


graded flat and graveled,


its white-block pillars


gone forever.

 


PAST THE DEAD-END,



a single light shines through twisted woods.


A bumpy drive to get here, as if dodging


unexploded grenades. No idea why we came


this way. And here’s the little lamp we glimpsed,


a Coleman lantern. A man in green camo bends


over something that gleams. Could this be


Robin Hood spreading the day’s spoils? A rich


man’s ring, a bag of silver to feed the country-


side for a week? No, he’s opening a tin


of sardines. No silver coin anywhere. Just


another homeless rousted out of town, caught


sleeping on the sidewalk or the stair.



BRAIDINGS



Almost fall, and all the trees are tinged


with tarnish, but breathing in a brisk north breeze


that dries what’s still alive, makes long-dead


grasses in a vacant lot bend to breeze strumming


as if unwrapping promises of change


in weather. I’ve followed my three dogs


on trail, watching how they braid the grass


with long-line from their harness,


with the wind, and scent blown in eddies


at a wall, a complex weave


that takes my dogs in variable curves and arcs


but steady to their quarry—the friend


hiding unseen in thicket


where a mainstream breeze won’t go.


My dogs in their triptych way


go on weaving his scent into a braid


invisible to me, an ever-changing flow.


I think, the more I learn


about the wind, the less I know. 

Today’s LittleNip:

ABANDON

Ripple on ripple she rayed the colors—
incomplete rainbows, not believing
in ends, or pots of gold. Blues and furors
of yellow, greens against the thieving
of Time. A glitch, a flash out of fog—
the teacher shook his finger. No,
you can’t have rocks or a squint-eye frog
in crystal pools. It helps the water flow,
she said. She wouldn’t fix her art.
Eye of glowing color in a mask of dark.

____________________

—Medusa, with thanks to Taylor Graham for today's fine poems and pix, including her photos of the Butte fire.