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LOOM By Taylor Graham

This silken carpet with its woven vines,
its pattern intricate as life’s designs,
lies underfoot and yet so far away –
like blue yearning that the heart entwines.

So tell me what the woven patterns mean –
the palmate leaves with clustered grapes between,
and birds that preen their wings but never fly,
and blooms imagined that I’ve never seen.

I’ve wandered on this carpet’s universe,
a traveler journeying from verse to verse
as if to entertain an empty hour
and rhyme it to a blessing or a curse.

But see, your feet rest on this carpet too.
I see among its threads your own eyes’ blue
reflected, like the color of my own,
as if sheer weaving made our pattern true.

Bio: Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog hander in the Sierra Nevada. She has had her poems published in International Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly and elsewhere. Her book The Downstairs Dance Floor is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.