June 2021
Bio Note: I am a retired teacher, tried to retire from poetry but it didn’t take, live in a small cabin on a small lake with my wife, Patti See, a prose writer who and has hundreds more readers than I ever will. I try to love her anyway. My work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation and on the Writer’s Almanac.
Poem In That Language
you never learned,
the truths of it buried
across seas unsailed
in a foreign land
below a hill unscaled
ablaze with flowers
you cannot imagine,
trees like generations of
ghosts you have no name for.
Its worth like loose change
in the ears of a stranger.
Its melody, as you speak,
its music escaping you
beyond translation.
Its vital rhythms busy at
lives you’ll never live,
eating meals you’d never order
with wines of strange vintage
with lovers unbidden
that sunny or sunless day,
that one night textured
like velvet, or silk, or cotton.
Maybe In This Poem
I am playing catch with my kids,
throw them a hundred grounders
and a couple dozen high hard ones.
We throw as long and far as we can
arching up into the eye of the sun
in a sky too blue to breathe or
to believe they will ever come down.
Or my daughter and I are dancing
in the kitchen, the tinny little A.M.
tuned low to some distant
static city fading in and out,
twirling and swaying, dipping
and laughing in the almost dark
that day she wouldn’t have forgotten.
©2021 Bruce Taylor
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