Monday, September 24, 2018

Diane Tucker

Diane Tucker is a Vancouver poet. She has three full-length poetry collections: God on His Haunches (Nightwood Editions, 1996), Bright Scarves of Hours (Palimpsest, 2007) and Bonsai Love (Harbour Publishing, 2014). She has also published a YA novel, His Sweet Favour (Thistledown, 2009). In 2013 her first stage play, Here Breaks the Heart: The Loves of Christina Rossetti, was produced by Fire Exit Theatre in Calgary.

She is one of the poet-organizers of Vancouver’s Dead Poets Reading Series — literally presenting the work of poets that are no longer around to read their own work.

God on his haunches

such an appalling picture
God on his haunches
like a bird watcher, waiting
for what he knows must happen
but will for the world neither impede nor hurry on
waiting for the crunch of the beak through the egg
waiting for the infusion of blue through the bud
God the time-lapse photographer

such a terrifying picture
that the Timeless One should savour time
should know the necessity of every second
should want to plunge me
into the deeps of every moment
drown me in the glory of that which has been made
raise me, sodden, into uncreated light
gleaming in the sun like a dolphin's back

a barbed baptism, the eternal end
reached only through fiery lungfuls of time
every second clotting the nostrils
each moment a coal ablaze in the throat

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.