The End of Night 

~Inspired by the 2008 National Geographic article on light pollution

Artificial beams shine upward, flooding

our evenings with the vacant

glow of urban life. We’ve forgotten

the river of stars and planets flowing

into the rest of our universe just beyond

the reach of the shallow night

sky. Astronomers claim we need the dark

to balance our circadian rhythms

of wake and sleep, to keep us steady

like gravity. But what does science know

about darkness or time or how dreams devoid

of hope wither and die when they’ve lived

as long as I have without light?

~Pamela Taylor © 2013

Collision Course

I’m trying to get on your radar screen, be more
than a blip you can explain away by low-flying geese
or a malfunction in your instrumentation.

You always retreat to the air of safety because you can depend
on the rise and fall of the sun, have memorized the way clouds thicken
and thunder then wring themselves clear. You think only the sky
can be trusted, but I’ve been flying solo too and have seen
the sky bend the wind to get closer to a flame.

One day you will look up and see me heading right
for you and have no other choice but to jump.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Fog

I should be used to this by now:
the way the clouds creep in low, blurry
my vision, force me to feel
my way through parking lots and down
slick asphalt streets. Flooding the path
with light only thickens the confusion.
But I’m impatient and burn my head beams
anyway, as if nature were a cable channel
and I held the remote control. I want to push
past these moments when the world pulls
the curtain around itself, settles
into an easy chair and waits for all to clear.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Great-Grandma Maggie Ballard

You are the one she still talks about
with grandchild awe, quotes your wisdom
chapter and verse about the size of John Brown’s
barn and the kitty that got no milk.

But this is all she will say.

She doesn’t tell me about great-granddad
Harris who gave you his name or the family
you entered and held together with spit
and polish and the force of your kindness.

These things I learned from older
cousins twice removed.

They recall your tack-sharp mind
and how you never met a hurdle or wall
you couldn’t jump or scale without losing
your steady breath or frowning your smile.

They tell me I am you incarnate, have told her this
for years and years, but this she keeps to herself.

Once she gave me a pillow with a photo
of your daughter’s distant face,
and I wondered if it was like yours, if
it would have tendered in its old age.

I know less about grandmother than I do about you.

All of her pictures you are gone, says my father
threw them out in one of his basement-cleaning binges,
but he’s dead now and she won’t tell me why
she kept them down there in the first place.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Night and Day

I’ll tell you something: nighttime
is different than the day.

The snow flurries in haphazard
patterns like gnats drunk
on honeysuckle. I have to squint

to see these frozen dots–small
and bleak–against the concrete

sky. Oh but yesterday, as I crossed
the street at eventide, I could have sworn
a million stars were falling.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

We Are Never Alone
~Inspired by Inuit art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Two spirit faces live
In each stone

Caribou stand on hind legs
To meet at the lips

The large man with the large heart stands
With his brother wrapped around his back

The hunter trudges home hunched
Over with meat from the winter kill
His dogs pant from the weight of their loads

A man flies to the moon
On the wings of eight black birds

An old woman embraces the cold
Away from her grandson

One woman carved in steatite
Carries her child next to another
With a bundled infant pasted to her left
Hip and a toddler clinging below

The littlest bear carries
The littlest one on its back

Even the tail of the whalebone goes
Nowhere without its soul

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013

Flash of Red

His stubble brushes my cheek
like sandpaper, the friction sparking a slow
burn from hip sway to toe reach.
There’s something different
about our dance, in the way he changes
direction to make this pleated skirt
unfurl in a flash of red, something
that pushes beyond the wall
of friendship we’ve built to keep
our hearts apart. I feel it every time
we lean in together like two
sides of a triangle, trusting
that the other won’t give way.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013