David Graham

David Graham’s most recent book is The Honey of Earth (Terrapin Books 2019). Others include Stutter Monk and Second Wind. He also co-edited Local News: Poetry About Small Towns (with Tom Montag) and the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (with Kate Sontag). Individual poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in journals and anthologies as well as online. He retired from college teaching in 2016, and now lives in Glens Falls, on the edge of the Adirondacks.

This Was No Playhouse

This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
—Robert Frost

Is there anything more sober
than a long-abandoned house?

Glass shards on the moldy floorboards,
steps to the cellar down which

nothing but shadows have passed
half a life ago. A piece of rain gutter

sings its rusty song to the gray wind.
Inside or outside no longer means

to the dust and the sky. Swallows
pace the air back and forth through

empty windows, and in the cold fireplace
are husks of walnuts and dried grass.

No kids’ broken toys remain, or Bibles
studied here by the breeze, but there is

a dented paint can in the hall, rust
erasing the label, and a dog’s leash

hangs from a hook—signs of life,
scraps of a story one could have told

before the fire, as gusts screamed outside
and snow rose against the foundation stones.

And wind sings the stories away.

Dream is But a Life

The kind of dream that wakes you up
even when you’re not sleeping—

the deep sleep of driving for years
the same unseeable route to work. Or

an interstate trance when the same towns
pass by. The exact sparrow in each rest area

picking over french fries. It doesn’t
fly away when you walk past—so there’s that.

This morning if this is still a dream it smells
oddly like diesel, mixed with a balsam pillow

escaped from a gift shop that no longer exists.
I gave up counting exits a long time ago,

and just hum along in the right lane
at exactly the speed limit. Sometimes

I think that funny engine-knock is in my heart.
What’s funny is that it really is. The difference

between a dream and the rest of life is like
the distinction between dog and cat. Some prefer

one, some the other, but for most of us it’s both,
like a road you can drive either way.