Keith Taylor
In Spite of Myself
When I walk into
the cabin up north
where I’ve stayed
for a week, a place
thousands of miles
from my father’s grave,
a place where I work
with scientists studying
evolution and adaptation,
a subject he and I
couldn’t talk about
without slicing
at each other, bitter
and certain of our ideas,
the first thing I smell—
individual, pungent
but not unpleasant—
is the distinctive scent
of my father’s body.
Five Days After the Extinction Report
There’s nothing one person can do
but because these things matter,
when we find a Least Flycatcher
car-struck on an unpaved back county road,
a disheveled clump of feathers
but still breathing, Amanda, trained
in this art, cradles the bird, lighter
than a pen in her hands, warms it,
calms it, brings it back until it flutters
off to the swamp edge, calls once
and is gone.
Infant Baptism
When she was six weeks old,
her mother exhausted, sleeping
and me dumb and clumsy
in my fathering,
I wrapped her and took her out
one late December night
in a snowstorm
to see a snowy owl
perched
in a tree
like a gigantic, puffy, pure white songbird
peering down on us,
yellow-eyed,
frightened or curious
or vaguely wondering if my daughter
might be food
when I lifted her toward him—
See? See?
Snow fell on her face
and she didn’t cry.
Keith Taylor is originally from Western Canada, but has lived for the past 45 years in Michigan. He has authored or edited 17 books and chapbooks. His most recent is the Ecstatic Destinations (Alice Greene & Co., 2018). His last full length collection, The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press, 2017), won the Bronze medal for the Foreword/Indies Poetry Book of the Year. His poems, stories, reviews, essays and translations have appeared widely in North America and in Europe. He has recently retired from the University of Michigan, where he taught Creative Writing for 20 years. Before that he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor for almost 20 years, but over the years he has also worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. Taylor has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs. He has been Writer/Artist In Residence at Isle Royale National Park (twice), the Detroit YMCA, The International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre of Rhodes, Greece, and the University of Michigan Biological Station.