Marilyn L. Taylor
Marilyn L. Taylor Ph.D., former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin and of the city of Milwaukee, is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Outside the Frame - New and Selected Poems, published by Kelsay Books.
Her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Poetry, Able Muse, Measure, Light, Rhino, Aesthetica, Mezzo Cammin, and the Potcake Chapbook poetry series. She has been awarded First Place in a number of national and international poetry contests, including the Margaret Reid Award for verse in forms from Winning Writers. Her own widely-read “Poet to Poet” column on craft appeared bi-monthly for five years in The Writer magazine. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Third Wednesday and Verse-Virtual poetry journals.
To My Neighbor John, Who Is Completely Happy
That moonlit warble in the summer dark
is you, John, singing your way home
from the Rehab Center where you work
evenings— one out-of-kilter chromosome
has never slowed you down. Your nightly whoop
floods the neighborhood with so much bliss
that my Dalmatian springs from sleep
and opens up her throat to harmonize
with you— along with every other canine
in a one-mile radius. Soon the air
is vibrating for blocks with strains
of an unearthly sweetness— prayers
rising from the bottom of the brain,
an ode to joy, with tabernacle choir.
First published in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry
For Max at Five Months
Hey, little handful,
beamish baby, super-napper,
better hold on to that smile—
there’s a toddler hiding right behind you,
and only a moon or two away, a boy
with a book and a bike.
Can you guess
where they’re headed?
Just around the corner, where
a young man stretched out on the grass
is contemplating a blue sky
filled with sailing ships.
As soon as you have learned
how to stand on your own
two feet you’ll set off after them,
and one by one they will take
you in. You will grow more
and more invisible.
You won’t even remember
being here, grinning at us
in pure, oblivious bliss—
where nothing interrupts
the present, or foreshadows
the great events to come.
First published in Verse-Virtual
The Seventy-Somethings in the Workshop
Breathless in their quilted overcoats,
the silver-haired contingent now arrives
shouldering their zippered canvas totes
stuffed with recent cuttings from their lives.
They claim they can’t recall a single line
of poetry—but soon they’re reeling off
entire chunks of Frost and Gertrude Stein,
Millay, MacLeish, Penn Warren, Nemerov—
and finally, from three-ring binders, lift
their own bespattered pages, creased and smudged
with fierce self-edits— like a sacred gift
to lay before the others, to be judged—
while Pound and Parker, Bishop and Jarrell
smile down upon them, wink, and wish them well.
First published in Verse-Virtual
One Last Favor
Why yes,
there is something
you can do for us
before you die.
You can please quit
grieving. Stop
leaking out all over us
the horror and the
dread. It’s hard
for us to watch,
we don’t like it,
we would so much rather
have you smiling like
a picture of Saint Jude,
stroking our hands and
telling us There there,
this was to be expected.
But with your whole spine
gone bent like that and
your head shaking back
and forth, your eyelids
stiff with fear and every
wasted muscle straining
to deny, deny — just where
are we supposed to turn
for comfort now?
First published in Verse-Virtual
Toast to the Also-Rans
We’re the ones who don’t know how to play
a jingle-bell, much less a French bassoon—
and yes, we’ve heard too many people say
we’re not so hot at carrying a tune—
but we salute the proud mezzo-sopranos,
violists (doomed to playing second-fiddle),
pumpers of abandoned player-pianos,
drummers drumming one more paradiddle—
Garage bands with Carnegie Hall intentions,
opera’s unsung supernumeraries—
all runners-up, and honorable-mentions,
stand-ins, sidekicks, rookies, temporaries:
with horns, kazoos and raspy vocal cords--
Bravo! From us, your grateful sounding-boards!
First Published in The Lyric, a quarterly magazine dedicated to traditional rhyming poetry.
What They Don’t Know
They are thirteen, all flying elbows
and thinbone knees, wrapping their tongues
around words like pimp and bare-ass
and hard-on. They are astounded
by girls, the bodies of girls, the onrush
of lips and hair, and they talk about
what it would be like to touch one of those
flashy breasts, to look it in the eye.
They are thirteen, and they don’t know
about the Buick they might be riding in
a year of two from now, packed in hip-to-hip
chanting a frenzied go go go go
until the pavement starts to bulge
and crest, lifting them, sending them up
into some kind of heartstop heaven.
They don’t know that the tree might be an elm
that the car will wrap itself around
in lascivious embrace, or that afterwards
a thin, watery sigh Open the door
could be the first sound and the last
before sirens take up the threnody.
For now, though, they lean lightly
on their slender bikes, polishing
a new language: horny, piss-off, kiss my ass.
Expertly they palm their cigarettes,
the thick smoke streaming
from their mouths and noses.
First published in The American Scholar
Genesis
Just beyond the window casement
while I puttered in the basement,
twenty-seven muddy nodes
were morphing into baby toads.
Wow, I shrieked in exaltation—
I am witness to Creation!
Astonishing, without a doubt!
But even so, it grossed me out.
First published in Able Muse
The Coming of Age
Last summer, I grew old. It was gradual
and damned implausible, I thought. Why mention
something so subjective—and so fragile?
Why give it any serious attention?
Just a quaver of the brain, I thought.
A gathering of neurons that were sick
and tired of catering to an overwrought
mob of memories on a pogo stick.
I’m talking arms and legs here. And sensations
sometimes called reflections. Dreams. Desires.
Know what I mean? No useless speculations,
flimsy euphemisms, qualifiers.
But I’m not worried! Just a bit perplexed
about what’s pretty likely coming next.
First published in The Orchards Poetry Journal
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