Taylor Graham
Potluck
Pack up the leftovers in Tupperware:
a clump of goat cheese from Greece —
just imagine rocky hillsides, sun-
dazzle on white marble, gorgeous gods
staring down from every height;
pack up the last cubes of watermelon,
trucked to this town of dingy snow
from someplace warm in Mexico –
oh, the glamour of starlit sands,
plaintive fingers kissing strings
of a guitar.
Little remains. It’s winter here.
But isn’t every hour of potluck saved
by romance of the far-away, a land
where life is beautiful when spoken
in a foreign language
one dreams to understand?
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006) was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
|
