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Trying to Get Through

By Eleanor Ross Taylor 1920–2011

I make a knife of words.

I sit here waiting.

I play with crumbs.

Her eyes that should look

straight at me are

toward the window, glazed—

husband’s horizon?

Not armored. Only armed

with pots and pans.

Not out of arm’s reach,

beyond curtains of doorbells,

garden gates.

She puts up ironwork

in her eyes; it draws a bolt

over what’s real—

then looks at me.

I wish I’d brought my saw.

Source: Poetry (October 2010).

Biography

Eleanor Ross Taylor was born in 1920 in Norwood, North Carolina, and graduated from Women’s College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in 1942. While studying at Vanderbilt University, Caroline and Allen Tate introduced her to novelist Peter Taylor, whom she would marry in 1943. Her poetry has been described as elegiac, lyric and feminine; writer Erica Howsare explains, “The southernness of her background . . .

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