Looking Forward, Looking Back
Taylor GrahamThis is the old man's makeshift family –
the Monday lady who feeds him
leftover meatloaf; the Tuesday girl
who sings him canticle and cadence
about a boyfriend who can't keep a job;
the Yugoslav lady who scrubs the sink
as if to wipe out memories
of her sister dying in the camps.
Starved spirits.
For hours he sits at his place, maybe
dreaming back to mosaic pools of childhood.
His mother used to laugh as she showed him
how, as if by magic, macaroni turns
golden with melted cheese.
And then comes Friday, and the girl
who drives him to the park to feed stale
bread crusts to the birds.
When the gulls swoop down, a swirl of hunger
on bright feathers, is he thinking
how she'll load him in the car again
for one last ride? No. Something rises
inside his skin like wings,
and he'll remember kites and the history of flight.Taylor Graham's poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and 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.