National Poetry Month: Aaron Tucker,

Excerpt from “Catalogue d’oiseaux”

– for Julia

you, fluent instrumentalist, skirt between pedal & key pressures

you, a jackdaw, choucas, others might mistake for crow

if they didn’t notice hard stare of grey irises

& the gradations of dark plumage lighten to wings’ tips

& darken to the talonsharpness of your beak

you, a jackdaw wandering through makeshift Lausanne markets

tables piled: sparse cords snaking to blenders, printers

phone chargers winding between spare books

atlases next to children’s books next to colour prints of city’s buildings

Swiss history, signatures all next objects, all opportunity, & you eye each

imagining how they will between the two tallest buildings in this city

where you have built your home on food wrappers & napkins

scraps of fabric wound around plastic utensils, receipts, newspaper

a TV, two chairs a table leg, pebbles, straw, leaves, a frog’s skeleton

a fine mesh of cat fur, pilled carpet, the feathers of other, lesser birds

you wander the market until you find a small altar piece

three parts, red & glinting gold, the Madonna holds a child

that child squirms when you move your head quickly, animating

but she remains still & you imagine it in your nest, a centrepiece

& you, opportunistic, a thief at heart, envision stealing it

extend to grab it while the seller has his back turned, fly off

instead, he turns, greets you Bonjour & you barter

Bonjour. Comment vas-tu? Bien bien. Combien de pieces?

Quinze francs. Non. Douze francs? Non merci. Dix francs. Oui.

 

Oui you both agree & he folds & wraps it in stiff paper

tapes it closed, waves you goodbye as you rise away, airborne  

Aaron Tucker is the author of the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and his latest chapbook with above/ground press Catalogue d'oiseaux. His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com).

Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teaching creative and academic writing. You can reach him atucker[at]ryerson[dot]ca