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All the Time You Want
All the Time You Want
All the Time You Want
Ebook94 pages36 minutes

All the Time You Want

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In Selected Poems, Keith Taylor, acclaimed poet of the Upper Midwest and the author of eighteen celebrated collections, delivers a stunning medley of his most lasting work: poems that remain vivid in the imagination, that have achieved a life beyond their first appearance on the page.

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.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherDzanc Books
Release dateJan 23, 2024
ISBN9781938603143
All the Time You Want
Author

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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    Book preview

    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

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