Stanzaic Stylings

OLD WEST DAYS Eerie wail from a harmonica. A little girl’s got her favorite bracelet on, charms of ponies, cowboy boots and branding irons, she’s jigging a hand- dance to hoedown music of her own. Don’t mind the smoke from the blacksmith stall, it isn’t coal like in the old days. Eerie wail of wind through distances, folks traveled so far to get here, across prairies, mountains. So much they left behind. The historical museum’s making room for more outmoded stuff from household, field, and mining claim – stamp-mill; crosscut saw; cast-iron stoves, tubs and troughs and wooden dollies for  4 a.m.  laundry; ploughs and harrows, lethal-looking farm tools for living back-when. Cast away, passed away. Eerie wail from a harmonica. Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles  (Everyman’s Library) a...

O STAR THISTLE They won’t sell you at nurseries, noxious weed. But you’re easy enough to find. Through long droughty summers no one waters you, yet you survive. You flourish along roadsides and give a soft jade tint to fields where every- thing else turns bone-brittle, dead and dry. You thrive. Sheep eradicate you. But they’re only an interruption. Now the sheep are gone. You creep through fences, on wind you fly like bees to hive. I crouch, Star Thistle, pulling you up by the roots, your bright yellow flower with a crown of spikes. Shall I call you sister? rejoice at your drive, your stubborn, invasive green? In a landscape burned gray- brown by the long summer sun, it’s you who look alive.  Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles  (Everyman’s Library) and  California Poetry: From the Gold ...

THE BELL TOWER Homely, unpretentious, local color – the old Gold Rush tower is symbol of our town. It boosts the tourist trade, standing tall, four-square with one toe in the westbound lane. Almost as famous as the noosed effigy that hangs from an old façade a little farther west. Both part of the town’s history: the hanged man a reminder of what happened when lynching wasn’t on the judge’s docket; the fire-alarm bell, a warning that towns are flammable. Main Street burned three times  in one year . Three, like the girls lured away from the tower – now a high school meeting-place; all three girls found murdered in the forest. And still, the bell tower is voice and heart of our town, a rendezvous everybody knows; a stage for civic celebrations.  Tonight , let’s read our poems under its hanging bell, for those murdered girls; for the past no bronze bell can call back. Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Ne...