Like dipping into William Blake,
parsing you is never
the same text twice.

Yours is the speech
of shifting sands,
your moods a sea of dunes

nicked with little crescents
of sense shaped by who knows
what winds, what rills, what magma.

You are unmappable,
will never hang on someone’s wall,
fit folded in some owner’s glove box.

No cartographer, no climatologist,
I record only the summits
of your weather, highs and lows,

and try to dress for every region—
each day uncertain whether
to don sun block or a parka.

–Richard Taylor,
Fading into Bolivia
Accents Publishing

Richard Taylor is a professor of English and currently serves as Kenan Visiting Writer at Transylvania University. A former Kentucky poet laureate, he is the author of six collections of poetry, two novels, and several books of non-fiction, mostly relating to Kentucky history. A former dean and teacher in the Governor’s Scholars Program, he was selected as Distinguished Professor at Kentucky State University in 1992. He has won two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Al Smith Creative Writing Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. He and his wife Lizz own Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort, Kentucky.