Measuring for a new counter-top
of black granite,

studying paint charts and testing
six subtle shades of avocado
on the kitchen wall,

replacing naked florescent tubes
with a natty overhead
in the style of art nouveau,

shoring up the side porch
to bring it into plumb, erasing
swags along the roofline—

my wife is making
so many improvements
I don’t sleep well at night.

-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.

You are my broke toe
which can’t be set—
no band-aid, splint,
no easy pill to swallow
but time’s slow fix,
this ragged knit of bone
and cartilage and shadow
till the hair-line cracks
that craze my old porcelain
mend, not whole but stronger,
misshapen maybe, baby—
yes, scarred, but healed
enough to ease this mizry,
to shake this forever limp.

-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.

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.

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

More from Fading into Bolivia and Richard Taylor:

• “Grading”
• Holler 72: Eric Scott Sutherland, Richard Taylor, Maurice Manning, & Don Rogers
• Richard Taylor is “Mapping the Local”
• Richard Taylor on Accents Radio (05/16/14)
• “Priming”

Reading term papers in my armchair
by the window this December morning,

I trudge an endless trail of print,
switchbacking down and across

page after page after page,
faltering in brambles of prose

that pile in mental drifts and vanish
from the path, no destination in sight.

Outside, the dogs skitter over new-fallen
snow, yipping and reveling in its simple,

perfect whiteness, their pawprints
swerving, halting, going this way, that.

-Richard Taylor
Fading into Bolivia
Accents Publishing

More from Fading into Bolivia and Richard Taylor:

• Holler 72: Eric Scott Sutherland, Richard Taylor, Maurice Manning, & Don Rogers
• Richard Taylor is “Mapping the Local”
• Richard Taylor on Accents Radio (05/16/14)
• “Priming”
• “Writing Slump”

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.