MATH, MYTH

This signal-to-noise ratio
heaping image upon image upon equation
(your frantic notebooks), a square-
root love poem in which a single rose
is greater than the complete
allegory of thorns.

Or, a star (constancy or dead
luminary) with all its electrons, its
flux of photons in the time it takes you
to write the formula
S(star) = flux * exposure time
could be expressed

in the subjunctive, uncertainty
of incoming light/inspiration.
As if light were generated randomly
without the finger of Apollo
on the switch, the lyre, the Pan-
flute’s ecstatic reeds

(listen to cattails at the edge of pond
below our window, singing
to themselves without the slightest
breeze) making such music as you
only imagine in your theorems
unprovable as love.



AN OLD JOURNAL

What did I expect? a sketch-
map, skulduggery treasure hunt
for a secret island,
pirate gold in rusty chests?

No, this book is filled
with lats and longs, his courses
plotted in a careful hand;
each night’s anchoring. Then,

sea-level measurements
to chronicle a glacier’s slow
retreat. How summers
lengthen, each August hotter

than the last; our globe
ripening like a fruit
too fast, about to split
apart, spilling its seeds.

And here he is, in photo,
piloting his boat
through a maze of icy passages,
the water bitter-green.

Treasure hunt, indeed.
How wild he looks
as if in wonder
at the waste of winter.


THE FURIES

February 14. A young stenographer, driving
to work, dreams of dinner for two
with hearts, as Zephyrus touches pine boughs
overhead, sends down a shiver of crystal ice
and Phoebus on a whim aims a sudden shaft
of sun that strikes her windshield,
7:11 a.m., solar-blaze through crystal

on glass to pierce her eye, she’s light-
blinded in a curve, the jogger
invisible then spinning off the edge
of pavement, rolling over and over out of
sight, a vision that repeats like
rewind playback of a tape, her crumpled
fender, sirens, lights revolving

an endless red pulse,
a hemorrhage. We’re the Furies
who keep her in the memory
of this moment, hold onrushing time
unchangeable inside that
moment; keep returning her
to the unforgivable.


Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems have appeared in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she is included in the anthology, California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006) is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her latest is Among Neighbors (Rattlesnake Press, 2007).