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for Marion
The sky slush gray,
the stream creaks
out of its winter
cocoon, unkinks.
The sun hovers, taking
a good last look at his
beloved before his long
trip. The trees cast
their jittery spells against
the onslaught of dark.
But that, like all this,
is mere mirage
to bend us, twist us, lift us
out of this.
©2003, Duane Tucker
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for Thomas Berry
“The earth’s rotation... produces... a movement of the earth’s crust over the rest of the earth’s body... this will displace the polar regions toward the equator.”
--Albert Einstein
There were igloos in the Middle East, fur-hooded corpses were rotting
in the Sand. Glaciers gasped: the North Pole had been wrenched
down to the Red Sea. The Danes were herringless, the French wineless,
the Mexicans were trying to make whale tacos. Swiss chocolate
was making sticky rivers in the sand.
WHAT WAS THAT WORD THAT HAD STUNNED THE WORD?
Eskimos had perished trying to turn seal into falafel. Hindus
were frozen solid. New York was on the Equator now -- not that
anyone noticed. They just unbundled and kept on bustling.
Until someone realized the music, the hum of the Word was missing.
The Word that had spun it all into singing, long before seeds were dewy-
eyed, flowers even dreamed of. The Earth had shuddered to a halt
and hurled off the world as we see it -- the skin of things --
like burning clothes. She hung frozen as the tongues on winter culverts:
the Word had choked on a word.
It had been so still here in the desert, still as a star. Now it was over-
flowing with grunts and wheezes as herds of polar bears crawled through
seas of seals and walruses flopping in the sand.
WHAT WAS THAT WORD THAT HAD STUNNED THE WORD? THAT WORD LIKE
THE GRRRR OF THE SUN-GONE BEARS. THAT WAS IT LIKE GRRRRR.
And still the reindeer struggle north, ever north over the mountains of waste,
over rocks and rotting bones, over torn metal and the fur-skinned
men who used to hunt them. Bring them back, they thought. Better to give
of our flesh the way it was intended than to wheeze away like this.
They had been walking for weeks. They’d watched their offspring shrivel
and die. Their parents too, swallowed by the ferocious sands.
The sound of their bleating still haunted the winds.
WHAT WAS THAT WORD? THAT WORD THAT HAD TURNED
FLOWERS TO DUST AS THE MOTHER SKIDDED FURTHER
AND FURTHER FROM HERSELF.
Only a few left, now, stumbling into the thinning air. They would make
it back home, home to the land so still you could see the pulse of things,
the land where the singing ice would drown that word forever,
that word that sounded like scar, like gore. That word...
WAR
©2003, Duane Tucker
Duane Tucker is an actor, screenwriter and poet. His poems are widely published; “Revenge (911 Series)” is in our Poems After the Attack anthology. He is still performing his one man show on John Muir.
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