All the Time You Want
By Keith Taylor
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About this ebook
With the signature charm and insight that have made him a beloved poet for nearly fifty years, Taylor dives into the wilderness of his life, in canoe and on foot. Across the decades, he reflects on what it means to be a painter, a writer, an observer of life’s ordinary beauties; on encountering a bear in the Michigan woods; on the evolution of hitchhiking and the lives of saints; on his transfixion with Doreen dancing at his grade school’s show-and-tell; and on the deep and abiding love of a long marriage.
A triumphant celebration of growing up and the life that comes after, this is a collection not to be missed by fans of American poetry and all who wander in the wilderness.
Keith Taylor
Keith Taylor has authored or edited 18 books and chapbooks, the most recent of which, published in 2021, is Let Them Be Left: Isle Royale Poems. His last full length collection, The Bird-while was published by Wayne State University Press and won the Bronze medal for the Foreword/Indies Poetry Book of the Year. He has received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, among others. After a series of mostly menial but formative jobs, he worked for most of twenty years as a bookseller, before teaching for a few years in the writing programs at the University of Michigan.
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All the Time You Want - Keith Taylor
THE HOLY DANCE
We hear they’ve opened
an old folks home
in her name. We’re proud.
We remember her black dresses
shining like bibles, her hand
moving lightly over our backs and arms,
her prayers, long and touching
(I timed her once—
sixteen minutes of grace before supper).
Only an old man
who moved south, to Nebraska,
remembers how she moved
and the hard burning
behind her
at the barn dance
where she turned,
fast,
spinning,
her white dress swirling out,
quicker, until everything
pulled in, even light.
FIRST DANCE
Black-haired Doreen—
the only girl with glasses in our class,
the only Catholic I knew,
the first child I ever saw dance.
We had heard that Catholics
danced, but when we snuck up
to their clapboard church at the edge
of town and saw the Virgin
through the window, we ran away—so young
we still believed all idols were devils.
We told brave stories about women
in long black dresses dancing around
a golden statue.
But when Doreen
danced at show-and-tell, when
those tiny black shoes clicked
so fast against the hardwood floor,
I almost cried. I wanted to dance.
It did not feel like sin.
FOR MARILYN AND THE ROOT CELLAR
She was a year older
and knew things
so I had followed her
here, deep into the center
of the only hill
in our prairie lives.
I held the light, slightly shaking,
while she brushed the shavings aside
and unearthed two potatoes
buried below roots
for warmth, still slowly growing
in memory of summer.
She cut the nubs away,
peeled back the skin
to potato whiteness,
and here, in the one place
we were told never to visit,
we shared the raw food
we were told never to touch.
THE HOUSEPAINTER’S RECREATION
The housepainter goes to bars
where interested women ask
him what he does. He says—
I paint. They treat him
with respect, even awe; they see
brown paint under his nails
and imagine he paints dark
canvases, full of angst
and sorrow. He smiles
sadly when they talk to him.
One offers to pose, but he says—
I don’t do people. She understands.
REFUSING PYGMALION
Perhaps that legend
of a man loving
perfectly sculpted stone
is right. Perhaps
we do create
everything we love. But I
haven’t carved this
woman from white marble,
haven’t fasted, prayed,
sacrificed for a god to make
her live. She is a sudden
gift, beautiful and marred
by a red scar across her back.
She has uneven hips.
SNOWBOUND
On Belle Isle, the hottest day
of the year, Walter,
nine years old, shouted
when wind hit the fountain
and white sprayed over us,
Look! Look!
It’s snow!
WHITE PINE STUMPS
Logging slash burned
for months, leaving stumps
as solid as memory
and five feet across.
We find them when we pass
from scrub oak and brambles
to the grass and deep shade
of those places far off the road
where our forest has matured again,
this time in beech
and maple filled with birds
the old loggers never