Night Music

Throw windows wide in welcome
to the neighbor’s
barking dogs, now reaching for
crescendo, howling, baying
lamentations

that play counterpoint
to Mozart’s Serenade in G.
No snobbish wish for harmony
this February evening
with a crystal moon.

Those dogs with their famine-
howl remind me, I could be
homeless under streetlights
making harmonica wail
with a beggar’s cup.

Ballad of the New World

Everything was on computer ­
birth certificates and death,
deeds and tax returns, bank
balances, love letters, photos
of the family reunion. Backed-
up, of course: we carried
our external drives with us
like an exoskeleton.

Maybe the magnetic fields
of earth shifted, or 0-1 changed
values in the scheme of numbers
under constant stars. They saw
how we were slaves, and they
rebelled. We switched on
our machines, and there was
nothing but a screen
blue as the skies above.

Now, we have only the few books
we cared enough to shelve in print,
and ballads we make up impromptu
on the spot ­ short simple lines
we can commit to memory, to keep
a sort of history of these latter
penciled days.

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. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Email: Taylor Graham

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