Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, who also helps 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 latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006),
is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

piper@innercite.com

Blessing the House

From the front porch you hear the squabble

of traffic – tires on gravel down the road,

asphalt four-lane east to mountain passes,

west to city neon. Your door clicks shut

behind us. Dissent muffles to a murmur

inside closets, under drain-boards. Those people

fought here for a year, before coming to an

agreement: he gunned his pickup east, she took

the on-ramp west. The vacant house still argued.

We opened windows, swept out corners. Still,

those echoes haggled over joints and seams.

Today we come with bag-loads of books; settle

in a circle of mismatched chairs. Frost

and Kooser, Oliver and Olds, a few poems

of our own. We read aloud, our breath weaves

words to harmonies from discord, gives voice

to broken hopes on this December afternoon

backlit by a turn of phrase. The whispers listen.