Duane Tucker

 

Lake Mamie Deva (For Marion)

The clouds: bacterial one moment, benign
the next. The same clouds. The stream stumbling
lyric to gibberish.

What of these flashes of light out of the corner of my eye?
It’s as if the altitude at this Sierra lake packs a punch.
Even the water looks roughed up, bruised.

Across the darkening marsh, I think I see a pine flash. I edge
to the edge. It’s nuts, I know, but I must find out.
I peer through the thickening ashes of dusk.

It’s a dead tree. I start off.
To hear you must come close.
Is the tree speaking to me? Have I been alone too long?

Time for me to think about seeing someone?
I slog across the marsh, the mute protestations
of air and see the tree that beckoned is not

dead at all—but a sapling sprouting from a near-submerged
log. Again the words, delicious as wishes:
To hear you must come close.

It seems to glow. Beckon. I squish closer.
Mucked up to my calves, I look about.
Who wants to get caught romancing a tree?

I press it to my heart and kiss the knobbed bark.
I am everything you fail to notice: the drunken grins
on ripples, the determined squint of March buds.

Search as I might, evening after evening, I have not
been able to find that sapling again.

 

Wounds (for Carrol)

Clouds are cages. Screaming freedom,
the wind charges the forest again and again,
The branches draw their swords.

The sap is the only thing that’s pleased. It dashes
down dank, lightless tunnels, cheering the wind
onward, anything to escape this endless stifle.

Never mind the ripple of winter wheat, the song
of the whippoorwill—a pair of legs would be enough,
a sliver of laughter, a scoop of pumpkin ice cream.

Wounds are wombs: the way things open, blossom. Is it possible
the soul tingles when the knife of sadness slashes?
Take this illness. It bled me the way songs bleed:

inward to the dawn within the tear.
Words skitter across the screen, coalesce
into image. One burns through the veil, spawns another

and from it another and another. Rainbowed and singing
they teem, dripping blood and fierce tears, swirling into images
so far beyond me, I may have dreamt or made them before I was

this flesh. It must have taken lifetimes of gutters and hospitals
to get this far. And if it takes hundreds more to keep them
coming, put me down, shackle me up.

                   Just, please, don’t tell me in advance.

 

Even Now (for Leo)

99% of our DNA is infinitesimal hobos taking us for a ride,
says the MIT scientist, solipsistic indifferences.
No wonder service seems a strain? Altruism a triumph?

Consider this: Even now, you and I are astride the stallion
of the empyrean, clutching his mane of cloud, giving the wind a chance
to feel good about herself. Even now, in the still afternoon,

we are the soil tingling at the dance of the grasses. Can anything be happier?
They make their living sunbathing; they have nowhere to go but up.
Don’t take my word for it: take a minute and let the stream spin you

out of yourself as it spins wayward reflections into unframed
masterpieces. What have you got to lose? The body
is a wave on an endless sea.

Give yourself to the autumn leaves: sing at the slightest gust.
And when the time comes, let go the branch and somersault to earth,
cherishing the gift you are

about to be.

 

 

Duane Tucker is an American living in suburban Toronto. Actor, screenwriter, critic and poet, he’s appeared in over 70 films and TV shows. He has sold several screenplays and written a one-man show on John Muir, which he performed for years. His poetry has been published in over forty publications, including Blue Unicorn, Luminous Wildflowers, Chrysalis Reader, Spillway, Midwest Poetry Review, California State Poetry Society, New Thought Journal, Passager (University of Baltimore) where he was voted poet of the year 2002. Visit him anytime at Poetry of the Soul.

 

Copyright © 2006 by Duane Tucker. All rights reserved.

This page published in March 2006.

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