by Richard Taylor

Pause a moment, the half thought twisting
like a rope lying limp across your hands.  Unravel the strands
a hand back from the end, backtwist

into the rope’s own turn a hand back more.
Go through with the fid, pry wide for the middle strand
to find a way back into the open rope.

Snug the center strand there, and an eye
begins to open with the fid again open the next arch
and pass the left strand through, then the right

on its own side.  Back twist, open again, thread under
and over the original twist, again and again
until the loose strands run out.

Trim the ends and roll the rough braid
beneath your foot, back and forth, until
the weave smooths, the spliced eye rounds.

Long enough at sea, now it’s a pen that pries against
the twist of thought, threads the strands across the turn of phrase
and opens an eye for what it is I am looking to say.

by Richard Taylor

March is pruning time, shears and cutting pole
let in the sky, trim out the shoots that would
outrun the muscled limbs that bear
and bring home apples.

What ritual do I dance, circling the trees?
I’m neither a pious deacon nor a priest but just
a country man, and the old ones show me light
through their innards gaping

brown and damp, dug apart by ardent woodpeckers
hungry for grubs and sap already climbing up
the lean live wood toward petals for orioles
and September picking.

Time’s honed axe has long been busy splitting
down the middle of the wasting trees like a sleepless
woodsman, and he’s impatient with our shadows
borrowing the light.

I won’t be long, but I must trim
the crowding shoots, the crooked twigs,
as the trees have trimmed me to the ways
and wages of aging.

Planted like me in ’38, they see
right through me and know a metaphor
can fashion of a man a givable self,
even on a chill spring day.

They have had their long look at me,
and we cleave as if twinned in the thin sharp
light that comes to heartwood.  They have felt
the breath of shears

and cutting pole above the patient snow,
and will attest to pruning’s wages
paid in apples and a simple man
who plies his gift and skill.

by Richard Taylor

“Gallop or get off the horse,”
said the First Sergeant who wasn’t,
though there was ground to take with a horse,
and his voice wore chevrons and rockers, three
and three, a loud diamond in the middle that declared
we were all present and accounted for, standing there
in a straw of sunlight kindling the tumult
of his white hair.

I was to take up the run the horse had
in his hooves, hear them all at once
and over and over say time is forever
short, and your single moment is
now; no more waiting afraid of his withers
quivering at thunder and squall out of nowhere
with a name.

His shoulders rolled exultant
over the green knolls, underway
and more, for his feet plucked fine at the turf,
and dactyls and oracles rose from his shoes,
tuning my knees, asking for ears,
quizzing my tongue.

“Short of full-tilt,” said the First Sergeant,
“any green field will ever stay quiet.  So
give him his head and the meadow will strum
at ease with a boy on a bay at a run.
More you don’t need, nor even me
to give orders.”

by Marie Gray Wise

We leave Mount Vernon in the rain
following a young man on a motorcycle
his tan shirt billowing
full of force and friction.

Willie sings softly
about Georgia and cowboys.
It’s 2:22, my lucky minute.
I feed my husband, the driver,
coffee sips and peanut butter crackers,
tang and a bit of grease.

All jive with this modern life we lead
far from the bucolic security
of our first leader’s stately farm.
Against his mansion
our own safety seems filmy, tremulous.

But it rides secure within this car
bouncing and dancing
on the web between me
and the man across the seat
as we drive into the force and friction
on the road to Richmond.