Winter from Spring

Copyright © 2009 by Charles Taylor.

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CONTENTS

The Wind Machine

Bumper Shoes, 1960

Elk Story

Beyond Mirror Lake

My Roughneck Father

The Day My Father Left

Embrace

Man Of The House

The Day I Left

End Of Twilight

To A Therapist

Head Nurse

Trees

My Mother Remembers Frank

George Hoffman

My Mother’s House

Vagrant

The Cup

Anthropologist

Letter For Marge

My Brother’s Call

Release

A Bonding

Workmanship

October Passage

Erosion

Reunion

Industrial Arts

Navajo Highway

Cowboy In The Laundromat

Villa-Lobos

Shorter Path

Sky Dance / Snake Dance

Ernesto

Visitation

High Plains

Each Grain

Damp Frost

Still Morning

April Day

Stars, Stars

The Puzzle Of The Sun

Sanctuary

Spring Pause

Indecision

The Braid Of Hours

Spring In Illinois

Umbrella

Poetic Friends

Why Study Mozart?

A Nest Of Rabbits

A Covering…

Peru, Illinois

Ninety Miles From Chicago

Slow Travel Like Going Into The Mist

Our History

Conversations

Day Shutters

Memory From My Youth

My Daughter’s Tumor

Writing Poetry

The Girl In English 101

Dorothy Knows

Summer Meditation

September Birthdays

For My Blind Friend

What I Asked My Father

December Love

California Suicide Blues

With George

Noon Meditation

The Music Of Autumn

Winter Wedding

Buddha Pictures

Broken Cross, Long Ago

This Is My Body

Full Page

Leaving Oregon Alone

Sunrise

Dedication

For Marjorie—

my wife, my best friend,

And for Laurel Ann,

our daughter

INTRODUCTION

AN AGONY OF CONTEMPLATION

I’ve been reading the poems of Charles Taylor for many years now: through these verses I have seen an intense, troubled young man develop into a mature writer with a great love for beauty and with intense respect for individual images, a man with profound love for wife and daughter and for his entire family, his attempt to comprehend his own place in that web of human relationships. Though some of what we witness in the work is intensely troubled, poetry itself is the beloved friend, the means to understanding and to acceptance of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Over the past few years Taylor has emerged as a skilled photographer as well a master of the free-verse line, and I see no conflict in this duality of aesthetic interests. Oh, perhaps I’m puzzled a bit as to why the poet has not chosen to utilize the haiku form, for the photographs often seek out that intensity of image and juxtaposition of images. But to find one’s way through the bewildering Taylor image sequences, perhaps it is good to keep the photographs, the idea of the photograph, in mind—though the poems are often not rendering of merely real things.

Above all else, these are verses that deal with and that attempt to define relationships: with father, mother, brother—and with wife, daughter, self—and with the beauty of things, the holiness of things inherently exterior to the human creature, but from which (in terms of affective response) the solitary, often troubled but always watchful and curious poet-awareness attempts to deduce meaning. From the height of the tower (in The Wind Machine), the child looses his kite to the moving atmosphere, and  . . . six thousand feet of air danced on my hand, / golden poppies exploding… . It is not merely that the kite soars on the invisible power of the air, but that the boy soars with it:

I left my body, held my breath,

touched the edges of high blue roads

dipping into artesian springs

and dropping back to the platform

above the orange trees . . . 

The centralizing trauma of childhood was the breakup of the family, the separation of mother and father, leading to divorce. The boy attempts to understand his roughneck father, the man with whom he could never compete, could never be like, but whom he would spend a lifetime trying to understand and to accept. Security lies with the nurturing mother, but challenge and the discovery of masculine nature lies with the father. In The Day My Father Left," we find these lines:

Mother shook in the kitchen

when he left. She asked me to look

into the living room to see if he was gone.

Willy-nilly, the inadequate child has become the man of the house—knowing full well his inability to replace the patriarch, and so he hopes that Maybe he’d come back / to look for us. I cannot resist the temptation to add these words from the poet Thomas Parkinson: I / Sit angling in the dark stream of / Our blood… . Years will pass before Taylor truly comes to know his father—before the two men become fast friends.

Young manhood will find the poet (The Day I Left) apart from mother or brother, apart from father as well, in Berkeley, California, and experiments with LSD—with the shades of Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley humming in the background. Ingesting the drug, Taylor tells us, I was a child watching gold weeds wave to me / in October air, spun with eucalyptus smell. The experiments with drugs, depicted in End of Twilight, will result in attempted suicide, a struggle to be free of haunting human awareness, an endeavor to secure peace:

I took the pack of razors…

raised a single