Taylor is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and 
also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field 
projects. Her poems have appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The 
New York Quarterly,  Poet Lore and elsewhere. Her manuscript, The 
Downstairs Dance Floor, is winner of this year’s Robert Phillips Poetry 
Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press.

A Caver's Wife

For an instant in bright
air, I held him.
Then I turned away.
I couldn't bear to listen
to the tension on ropes descending -
ropes stretched to breaking
as ropes can, the slack
and shock of ropes let down
hand over hand
like night sinking into a well.
Afterwards,
I walked back home
and drew water from the well
without looking
down into it.
But the image
came to me anyway,
a full moon in the huge
black sky