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Old Song Played Again

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An old song on the radio
is heard again in one’s forties
after many years of interlude
during which the song
and memories of the song
have lain apart, dormant.

At the song’s new playing
here in the diner on a Saturday
some old idea is newly understood,
a truth revealed which had been hidden
years before back when the song
was often played on the radio.

How to reply, from that point on
when the children ask “Is this the one?”
Something has changed.

Background sounds intercede;
forks clinking, murmured conversation.
The song plays on.  You know each note.

“It was my favorite, when I was young.”

-B Taylor, 2016

notes on ‘Engineer Blues’

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I wrote this poem over 25 years ago, back when I was a student.  I think it was my best work of that time.  It’s the only poem from those days that I kept.

I was always inspired by large-scale, mundane engineering works such as highway overpasses, towers to carry high-voltage lines, etc.  They always seemed (and still seem) so majestic, even though no one thinks much about them.  Engineering works are that way sometimes: amazing, and utterly un-noticed.  Somehow they also seem a bit sad, especially these static ones that literally stand in one place for their entire lifetimes as the more interesting world changes all around them.

The original idea of these was to contrast such works to more traditional statues.  Most statues are build to recognize and remember powerful men.  Towers like this are built, well, just to serve a purpose, and not recognize or remember anything.

notes on ‘Sketches of 16 Men’

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I have been roughly half of these, at some time or another.

The reference to ‘childhood home’ came after writing the rest of it and needing a way to end it; something to rhyme with the word ‘poem’.  These are really meant to be contemporary / modern-day things that I have done or seen other men do; so I am not personally meant to be the ‘reader’ in the last stanza  But I guess there is an implication that we watched our fathers do a few of these things also, when we were younger.

Sketches of 16 Men

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A man without any business sense.
A man who lives in the present tense.

A man wielding a large axe
splitting logs, which he then stacks.

A man disinterested in his dinner.
A man who states aloud: “I am a winner.”

A man laughing at his child’s joke.
A man without a job and broke.

An angry man, slowly becoming
sad instead. A man running.

A man blind to his own violence.
A man who realizes, and repents.

A man screaming at the screen-
a madman, for his chosen team.

A man alone with his fears
on a dark porch as daybreak nears.

A man eating a hot pepper by itself.
A man pulling whiskey down from a high shelf.

An old man who thinks of his childhood home,
reading a short and simple poem.

B Taylor 2020

notes on ‘Idea of the Dog’

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This is a true story about my wife. She noted one night, after sleeping poorly, that now she sometimes sleeps curled in a ball “even though I’m not sure the dogs are there; I don’t want to move because I might wake them up if they are there.”

I contemplated this for quite a while. My own policy is to kick the dog off the bed whenever he’s in my way. And even if he isn’t in my way, usually I’ll kick him out just on principle.

It seemed like an interesting idea, that it was not the dog in her way, but just the idea of the dog that was in her way.

One cardinal rule of poems is to boil it down to very direct and short statements; and not to ramble on. I broke that rule here. Sometimes it’s good to break a rule. Here it was just more fun to ramble a bit, and rhyme while doing it.

Idea of the Dog

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My wife refrained from stretching out
her legs in bed, so as not to disturb
the dog lying there. Although I doubt

the dog was actually lying there.
It was dark and I could not see him
in the blackness, with his black hair.

The actual dog does not sit, nor fetch;
nor was he actually on the bed
in that space into which her legs would stretch.

She feared the dog would be inconvenienced; 
though I don’t think it’s possible to inconvenience
a dog. (That is one difference between us.)

And I’m very sure that an idea cannot 
be inconvenienced. It just cannot.
Nevertheless, though it was a bit hot

and she would have preferred mightily
to stretch her foot out from under the covers
instead she remained curled up tightly

in a ball and endured, so as not to be a
hinderance or bother, and continued
to accommodate herself around an idea.

For while the actual dog was absent in this case
the idea of the dog was quite real
in that night, in that particular space.

B Taylor 2020

Ukulele Dreams

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for Tom and Dee and M&M

Next to me on this airplane
a lawyer, or executive
just looked at photos of his wife

and daughter playing ukulele
in their living room together.
I glanced a moment. He did not notice.

We are over the pacific.
Somewhere below, on a green mountainside
an island girl plays a ukulele.

I play ukulele a little bit.
My oldest daughter plays it too.
We two together, just a bit.

Travel safe, executive.
Return home to the mountainside.
Return home and remove your tie.

It was right that you missed them.
They await you patiently
on the green mountainside of home.

B Taylor 2016

notes on ‘God as Polaris’

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Polaris is the north star. In the night sky, the other stars circle it during the course of the night. Only Polaris stays in one place through the evening.

If you are a religious person, you can easily find some divine beauty in the passing of the stars. To me it seemed like the most perfect and pristine motion, and yet also the most massive motion I could comprehend. The original idea of the poem was to compare that heavenly pattern with ever-lesser patterns, made by ever-lesser life forms, here on Earth.