How About the Bees?

Pioneer Cemetery

—Poems and Photos by Taylor Graham, Placerville, CA

YOU LOVE THE MYSTERY
    pioneer cemetery

She’s roaming this old graveyard by day
dressed in blood-red, quite blind to a bright living world.

You read inscriptions, marvel at how
time and weather can scrub a lifetime’s details away.

She hovers—eyes wide saucers, intense
blank pupils; abandoned, drooping lids—then disappears.

Is she mourning a world of love lost
before she was gone too, dead too soon, only a girl?

Button your jacket against sudden
chill, and a mist that rises neither from fields nor swale.

Come back on a sunny day, look-see
if she’s there, when even cypress casts a pleasant shade.

 Fluter

INTERIORS

We enter through the back, the kitchen door.
Spaces open into the interior, dark inside
of window-light, door-frames not quite true,
an old house. Atop the wood-burning stove
rests a rusted Geneva hand-fluter, its memories
of crimped collars and ruffled trims. Heavy,
iron. The people who once lived here stare
framed from a wall beyond, couples paired by
buttons, tucks and flounces, or the worker’s
practical cut. Countenance unsmiling—fashion
of the time, a photograph almost as final
as a funeral. Expression the same, regardless
of social standing. We move on to the private
rooms. Flowers of a quilted bedspread, steamer
trunks with lids raised to show off linens,
intricate lacery, layers of dress. Boxes of secrets
left open and forever closed. A curtain
dances with air through a window someone
forgot to shut.

 Fungus 6

FLOWERS OF ROT

Thanksgiving’s over, its leftover abundance
just beginning to push up into daylight
through November-fresh blades of new grass
and a mat of decomposing oak leaves
on our hill above the pond, its morning
scrim of mist—
mushrooms and toadstools, I can’t tell
which. Not our common grocery-produce
white buttons. I won’t touch, much less taste.
I take their portraits: chubby pale infants
who never cry. Not when the squirrel nibbles
at their soft cheeks. Some nod as if sleepy
in their frilly night clothes. Ruffles and pleats
of fungus flesh.
They’re beautiful. They assume their place
in this dying world that comes to life—
even now, before the dead of winter. Clouds
pass over, only loosely rooted in sky.

 Fungus 3

SNOW SCULPTURE

But it hasn’t snowed yet
on this December pasture.

White as a Renaissance marble
in rising spiral out of earth—

yet it’s alive, it’s moving.
I’m driving by at 60

passing front to flank
almost too fast to focus on—

two white donkeys?
in a mating dance. Heat

of iced December
for the patience of such making—

in a windswept field, a year from now,
new life out of old earth.

 Sunup

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

This festive eve.
My dog leads the way along dark fringes
behind Motel 6. Travelers hoping

to get back together into family, to unwrap
the gift of dawn.
Behind a dumpster my dog

wags her tail, smiles,
and here’s a man’s face by reflected light.
I can’t tell, he might be

someone’s old high school teacher,
squatting beside a cardboard box
where I guess he’ll spend the night.

His breath haloes in the cold.
I don’t know him. My dog
licks him in the face as if she does.

Tomorrow is holiday.
Laden tables, warmth between the walls
greeting everyone by name.

 Landscape with Fence

 

WILD JOURNEYMAN

That man under knapsack has got a home
somewhere if he’d remember or imagine it
forward; camo’d in loden among the rags
of leaves unfenced by storm, winds of change.
He’s hunched against halt-greed short-
sightedness about communal weather. He’s
never lost the irony of his first language,
but the place he knew is gone. He goes on.
Miseries sag from every wire woven to imprison
space. He escaped the fiercest wall. The key?
He slips through any lock, never allowed
his heart to be stone mortared to stone. Heart
of clown, fool, clipper of strung wire to let
the free music out of concertina, a vagrant song
to the fiddle’s moan. Heart can rise from
floorboards or forest litter, seek out the next
new place. The sun has never set on him.
Not yet.

 Coyote Bush

Today’s LittleNip:

COYOTE TALE
Response to “Felony Fauna Faux Pas”
by Caschwa on Medusa, 11/27/17
—Taylor Graham

Remember that burst of white bloom
in a tiny triangle between canyon
road and vacant lot graded for development?
Coyote-bush as if decked with snow,
a dazzle before I drove down the grade.
Coyote-bush all in white for early-winter.
They say, bees come out
of hibernation for the nectar. Coyote-
bush otherwise non-descript,
chaparral-dull, you might not notice.
For me, a bit of doldrums-cheer
in winter-dark on the canyon grade.
You know the story. The road
was widened—safer, but somehow
the old one cheered my soul. And that
ready-graded lot got developed, wiping out
coyote-bush. How about the bees?

___________________

Our thanks to Taylor Graham for her fine photos and poems today, even managing to slip in a little red, our Seed of the Week. You’ve probably noticed, also, that she and Carl Schwartz (Caschwa) are having a conversation. Such co-creation is always encouraged in the Kitchen.

Head yourself across the Causeway tonight to hear Bill Gainer and Anna Marie (plus open mic) at Poetry in Davis, John Natsoulas Gallery, 8pm. Or, of course, there’s always Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Cafe in Sacramento (features and open mic), also at 8pm. Scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info about these and other upcoming poetry events in our area—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

 Outside looking in, or inside looking out? 

Celebrate the poetry of varied points of view!

Photos in this column can be enlarged by clicking on them once,
then click on the X in the top right corner to come back
to Medusa.