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Geography of One – Richard Allen Taylor

Posted in family, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , on September 25, 2026| 11 Comments »

 . 
[ 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor ]
 . 
Continental Divide
 . 
When I drop the word cry on the spine
of a mountain ridge, weep flows down
one side, shout down the other, one word
split into different-meaning halves,
 . 
then face will follow, turning toward
the Eastern slope while becoming the front side
on the West, and
 . 
check will hesitate at first, not sure whether
to inspect for defects or stop a moving object,
 . 
but before I drop the word orange,
I have to decide whether to eat it or wear it,
 . 
and I discover the word colonizing, when released
from high altitude, might burst into colon and zing
like a couple divorced for irreconcilable differences,
 . 
and knowing that rivers seldom head straight for
the sea, but wander sometimes in great bends
and curves before they reach home, one must
be careful when dropping a grenade like love.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
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❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Blessed Are
 .  .     after “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
 . 
Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
that does not include a narrative of water—
a river, a lake, an ocean
 . 
pounding on the beach below the open windows.
My father bought a farm
with a white house on a hill, a pond
 . 
at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
All of it was, shall we say, liquidated.
Gone, the tiny lake
 . 
fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest
ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought
neither the view nor the serenity.
 . 
We were reaching elsewhere, for something
less pastoral, more hopeful,
something more highway
 . 
than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
The torch goes out, we thrust our hands
forward, grope walls,
 . 
feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
against its sides. All it takes is the will
to swap adjectives.
 . 
Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
Here we go again with that
narrative of water. Snow, hail,
 . 
ice melting in your palm. Later, when drought
squeezes the pond dry, a spark catches,
and fire climbs the hill—
 . 
everything promised burns. The difference between
bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
Bold when we rush forward
 . 
to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
force us back to a place
where faces do not melt.
 . 
When rain finally comes, we inherit the memory
of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
 . 
We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection..
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
Song for a Wind with No One Left to Talk To
 . 
Now that you’re alone, wind,
where will you go?
north, sough, high, low
 . 
Now that you sleep, wind,
what will you know?
peace, love, war, snow
 . 
Now that you’re empty, wind,
how will you fill?
zephyr, gust, sail, chill
 . 
Not that you’re free, wind,
what else will you be?
home, afar, aloft, alee
 . 
Now that you die, wind,
how will you rise?
cloud, star, spirit, sky
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from The Geography of One, Main Street Rag Enterprises, Edinboro, PA; © 2026
 . 
 . 
❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
 . 
About a month shy of 60 years ago, DuPont transferred my Dad (again) and we moved from Michigan to Aurora, Ohio. The first of November was my first day of eighth grade in my new school, and my first class was German with Fräulein Appenzeller. I shuffled my feet while she introduced me, then declared that they already had a Wilhelm in the class and therefore christened me Fritz. For the next five years most of the kids in Aurora thought my real name was Fritz.
 . 
I sat down and looked around the classroom. I don’t remember much from that morning, but I do recall that there was one girl with long dark hair and very red cheeks. I mean really red, like silver dollar sized lipstick circles. Was this an arcane German class ritual? Turns out it was lipstick, from Halloween the night before. Turns out she had tried really hard but hadn’t been able to wash it off. Turns out her name was Linda. Turns out eight years later, in 1974, we would get married.
 . 
Turns out we still are. During those almost 60 years now the proportion of time we have driven each other completely nuts has been far less than the proportion of time we have made each other laugh. Or at least smile. Smiling — I love that.
 . 
Smiling is what these little paragraphs are about. Richard Allen Taylor’s poetry always, always makes me smile. His new book of poetry is crammed to bursting with smiles. Not just the poems that are funny – slyly, wickedly, innocently, unexpectedly funny. Also and even more so I am smiling with Richard and with his poems about these last few years he has lived alone, and about the three decades he and Julie were married before her death from leukemia. Smiling because love remembered and relived in such a pure, tender, and honest way lights up the world. Smiling because it is a gift to discover a poet willing to give so much of himself or herself.
 . 
Turns out, Richard, that you are the world’s biggest mensch, and I love you. Keep smiling.
 . 
❀
 . 
Order Geography of One from Main Street Rag Enterprises.
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❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀
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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:
. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;
. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.
 . 
If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:
 . 
 . 
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 . 
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 . 
COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM
 . 
Thanks again for joining the conversation.
 . 
– Bill
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2020-11-22
 . 

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Saturday Share — Radavich and Taylor

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , , on November 22, 2025| 5 Comments »

Saturday morning readers share:
David Radavich and Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
Birthday
 . 
Every year a leaf falls,
one at a time, hands,
days full of raking, scattering
 . 
and I come to see
the bare tree
of us
against the sunlight
strewn in branches, shimmering
naked against all
 . 
those colors you give me
tumbling free
within a small space,
 . 
a time together
walking in woods
 . 
David Radavich
 . 
For a possible Saturday poem I have selected Birthday, which strikes me as a quintessentially autumn poem. It was first published in my book, By the Way: Poems over the Years (Buttonwood, 1998).
 . 
 . 
The picture shows me ensconced in a park in Champaign, Illinois when my hair was not yet silver. As for a curious factoid about me, I enjoy reading German philosophy (in German), especially Schopenhauer and Cassirer. Also, casting horoscopes. Go figure.
 . 
Additional poetry by David Radavich at Verse and Image:
[April every year? David always contributes to our special EARTH DAY posts.]
 . 
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
 . 
Blessed Are
+++++ After “Ode on Inheritance” by Kate Partridge
 . 
Perhaps there is no inheritance worth having
+++++that does not include a narrative of water—
++++++++++ a river, a lake, an ocean
 . 
pounding on the beach below the open windows.
+++++My father bought a farm
++++++++++with a white house on a hill, a pond
 . 
at the bottom. My mother inherited. She later sold.
+++++All of it was (shall we say) liquidated.
++++++++++Gone, the tiny lake
 . 
fed by a stream tumbling over my father’s modest
+++++ambitions. Just as well. My brothers and I sought
++++++++++ neither the view nor the serenity.
 . 
We were reaching elsewhere, for something
+++++less pastoral, more hopeful,
++++++++++something more highway
 . 
than country road. But even a cave can elicit hope.
+++++The torch goes out, we keep thrusting our hands
++++++++++ forward, groping the walls,
 . 
feet following our blindness. As if a hole could lean
+++++against its sides. All it takes is the will
++++++++++ to swap adjectives.
 . 
Trade wet for slick. Choose briny over soaked.
+++++ Here we go again with that
++++++++++narrative of water. Snow, hail,
 . 
ice melting in your palm. Later, when the drought
+++++squeezes the pond dry, the spark catches
++++++++++ and fire climbs the hill,
 . 
everything promised burns. The difference between
+++++bold and meek becomes a matter of timing.
++++++++++Bold when we rush forward
 . 
to extinguish the blaze. Meek when the flames
+++++ force us back to a place
++++++++++where faces do not melt.
 . 
When rain comes, finally, we inherit the memory
+++++of blackened hills, even if no lawyers or signatures
++++++++++ attend. When grief follows, we console ourselves.
 . 
We say the trees bury their seeds under layers of ash.
We say the trees dream of resurrection.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
 . 
This poem first appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig Online, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination. It is now part of a book-length manuscript, Geography of One, that will be published next year if all goes according to plan. 
 . 
 . 
This is my habitat but not necessarily the only habitat or even where I spend most of my time. But I don’t have a picture of me typing at my desk. That would be my real habitat and that would be boring. 
 . 
Interesting tidbit: After retiring from my job as Regional Human Resources Manager of Hendrick Automotive Group in 2013, I earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte in 2015. 
 . 
Additional poetry by Richard Allen Taylor at Verse and Image:
❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having your poem appear, please see the GUIDELINES here.

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The Law of Love

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| 9 Comments »

 . 
[with 3 poems by Richard Allen Taylor]
 . 
What’s Happening?
+++ after Choices, a watercolor by Catherine Mainous
 . 
Of course, I recognize it right away,
this landscape where past and present
bleed into future, as I have bled,
as we all do. I start green and work
my way up, grasping at blue. Earth
always reaches for sky, the tiniest seed
pokes through saltmarsh and sawgrass,
green fingers periscopes looking for light.
I always look for dawn. No, that’s wrong.
Sometimes, I search for dark and find it.
The light comes later, after regret, guilt.
See how that diffused orange glare
in the corner blurs into a bridge
to nowhere, skeletal structure
never completed. That’s what
you get with unrequited ambition.
Beginning, middle, no end.
A purple cloud in the distance.
A crane untethered.
An unexpected answer
to an unexpected question.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
She doesn’t believe in inertia. If I take both hands off the wheel for a femtosecond, she’s convinced we will instantly swerve into the embankment.
 . 
She does believe in gravity. Since my last birthday she has forbidden me from using the stepladder to hang Christmas lights on the dwarf spruce in our front yard, much less reach to get the star on top.
 . 
She absolutely rejects Heisenberg’s principal of uncertainty. Whether I can detect them or not, my keys are fixed in place right where I left them.
 . 
She’s a little iffy on the conservation of angular momentum. If I accelerate into a curve to maintain a constant forward velocity, she wants to know why I’m speeding.
 . 
She accepts evolutionary biology without complaint but wanders from the straight and narrow of taxonomic hierarchy. Lizards and toads she seeks out as cute; snakes are OK only behind glass; spiders and gigantic roaches, even millipedes, she captures under a paper cup, slides a birthday card beneath, and relocates into the yard; fruit flies and ants must die.
 . 
And the law of love? It is, of course, not exclusively physics and biology. It also includes the law of culture and connection, of which she is founder and curator. When a particular issue of National Geographic reaches its twentieth birthday, she tears out each article worth saving and files it, astrophysics to zoology. She will let me re-read them if I but ask.
 . 
One more thing about the law of love: it seems to disobey Newton’s third law of motion. For each of my own actions – and how often they do violate something – there is a reaction, but thank God not opposite and equal. However sharp her initial glance and inflection, the ultimate consequence so far has been forgiveness. This is one universe I am happy to live in.
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
The Second Law of the Apple
 . 
If the first law was not to take
the first bite, lest you be banished
from the garden, the second law
ought to be to finish what you start,
 . 
meaning the first bite obligates you
to a second, and a third, and so on
until the apple is eaten, except
for the core, which contains
 . 
the seeds, and sine you will be
traveling anyway, away from
the garden that spit you out,
you might as well learn
 . 
banishment from one place is not
the end, but merely another beginning,
and what you do with the seeds
is everything.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor is part of the holy jangle of things / fastened to the belt loop of a forgetful world. The poems in Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems are able to weave from the commonplace and humbly wonderful things of this world a sweet sadness . . . droll observations . . . life-giving joy. And some good jokes.
 . 
We knew this first collection since Richard’s wife’s death from leukemia would build a house for grief and healing. Who knew that Karen Carpenter would lend such a hand, but Richard weaves remembrance and biography together into powerful metaphors for attachment and loss. These poems speak to grieving with the whispered voice of his late wife, Julie – a mellow bell rings in the canyon. / And the canyon is me – as well as in Richard’s own sure voice of seeking, his wisdom steadily revealed as one that doesn’t cry for answers but is happy to linger with the important questions. All the old questions / that rise in the wake of storms: each of us must confront and accept these questions if we are to be fully alive. Autumn fades, winter enfolds us, but the seasons continue to turn. At the end of everything is not sadness but wonder, friendship, and love.
 . 
❦
 . 
Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems is available from Main Street Rag HERE
 . 
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
I Write to You About Julie, My Wife
 . 
I named a star after her. Astronomers call it
HD 10180. Both Julies—the woman I remember
 . 
and her eponymous star—emit a kind and generous
light. The star deserves a name that twinkles, and she
 . 
deserves the star. I never called her HD 10180,
but often call the star Julie. I chose it out of billions
 . 
because, like you, Julie got along so well with others—
none of that blasting the neighbors with deadly gamma
 . 
ray bursts, the way some pulsars do. And like the star,
my wife, when she was alive, had a family that orbited
 . 
her adoringly. Astronomers have identified a possible
gas giant, designated HD 10180g, residing comfortably
 . 
in Julie’s habitable zone, and—though the giant’s crushing
gravity could never support planetary life, they may find
 . 
moons that do. Suspected of strong winds and colorful
bands, without Julie’s life-giving warmth and shine,
 . 
HD 10180g would be little more than a vast frozen cloud,
a derelict adrift in deep space. I wish I could point out Julie
 . 
to you, but it’s in the constellation Hydrus, which is only
observed from the Southern Hemisphere, and, though
 . 
brighter than our own sun, Julie resides one hundred and
twenty-seven light-years away. We’d need a telescope.
 . 
I understand your concern that the striking similarity
between the designations HD 10180 and HD 10180g
 . 
might confuse some observers. Don’t worry.
To anyone who ever saw us together, it’s obvious
 . 
I am the gas giant, and she is the star.
 . 
Richard Allen Taylor
from Letters to Karen Carpenter, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC; © 2023
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
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❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
ECOPOETRY FOR EARTH DAY 2024
 . 
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
  +++ — John Muir
 . 
VERSE & IMAGE is seeking poetry to celebrate Earth Day, April 22, throughout National Poetry Month. Do you have a favorite poem that speaks to universal interconnectedness, as in the above quotation? Send it to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com by April 10 and we may share it in one of several posts dedicated to living together on our living planet.
 . 
Please read these guidelines:
 . 
Deadline April 10, 2024, midnight Eastern Daylight Time USA
 . 
Send ONE poem by any author except yourself addressing the theme of connections.
 . 
Include the full text of the poem in the body of an email or as a .DOC or .RTF attachment to ecopoetry@griffinpoetry.com. Please add info about where the poem is published.
 . 
Also include a personal statement – how do you feel connected to this poem? What does it mean to you? How has it connected you to the earth? [suggest 100 words or so; may be edited for length]
 . 
Visit GriffinPoetry.com between April 15 and April 30 to see if your poem has been selected for presentation.
 . 
Optional: if you submit one poem by an author other than yourself, you may also submit one poem on the same theme that you have written. We prefer previously published – include acknowledgments.
 . 
❦ ❦ ❦
 . 
Doughton Park Tree 2021-03-23

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