As I drive to work, the sky is void
as though the clouds have seceded
to compose their own republic of rain.

The red fox that scurried across
the road last week, the one I’d been saving
for a poem, insists she’s only a red fox.

Even the puddles from yesterday’s shower,
metallic and flat as spatulas, shrug off
light and hold the shadows hostage.

I imagine my son’s stolen Honda
being dismantled in some chop shop,
an automotive diaspora, its disc player

surgically transplanted, radials married
to a pickup, say in Alabama, hub caps
migrating to some Valhalla of chrome.

Something will come, I tell myself.
Still, the mimosa holds its tongue,
its punker-pink blossoms speechless.

In an act of unwitting collaboration
that describes her state and mine,
my mother calls to say, “Some days
I feel I’m fading into Bolivia.”

–Richard Taylor,
Fading into Bolivia
Accents Publishing

More from Richard Taylor:

• Richard Taylor’s “Most Important Thing”
• “Birthday” by Richard Taylor
• “Grading” by Richard Taylor
• “The Angel’s Share” by Richard Taylor

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.