low tide

by diane tucker


low tide, and everything hidden
is now uncovered: the black weed, certainly
but also the upright fields of barnacles fighting
for space with the black mussels, these
gathered like a thousand shiny goat hooves
tied up and down the oily piles

the air is not their native habitat
in the breeze they clamp tight shut
nothing moist and pulsing
must be open to the sunlight

and we admire their defense, breathe
in sweetly their walls’ salt smell

when the tide lowers around our own
wet hearts there is no shield to slam
no doors we can clap closed around it
like the lid covers the glittering slick eyeball

no dreaming in briny bone-cells
for our washed up, low tide hearts

while the sun shines, they must lie
still in it, let their tissue-thin skin crack
and curl open, gasping in the open air

tides change
turn and return
barnacles and mussels, even the black
weed crunched in the sand, know
the tide will miss them and come back

our hearts, baking in their cracked-up
hides, lose all knowing, can breathe only
shallowly for reasons they cannot remember
trying not to lose what’s left of slippery life


“Low Tide” was first published in Bonsai Love, by Diane Tucker (Harbour Publishing, 2014, www.harbourpublishing.com) and is shared here with permission.

blue melodica

by diane tucker


The wet-felt overcast air packed
into the August afternoon is scattered,
cooled by your melodica and your voice
in old French song.

The humidity gathers itself
into raindrops and rushes to you.
It throws you all its tiny silver coins.

All the damp sweaty scurriers,
tourists and shoppers, be damned.
You are going to sing.

Thank you for your blue-boxed breath,
your thin paisley dress dripping
bohemian beside designers’ doors.

At the rushing hour of the afternoon
you pull harried ears to the curb,
bring into focus the waiting bench
and the fresh tree. Your song’s
momentum speeds us into stillness.

vancouver dry-dock

by diane tucker


The gulls’ shadows, temporary crows,
rush up the dock’s rust-stained sides,
meeting their white-as-angel selves at its lip,
all under the gaze of two yellow
tyrannosaur cranes on their bee-striped feet.

Some of the black bird-shapes are real crows
and the rest are seagulls’ shadows, wider,
their wings narrower and knife-shaped, gulls
trying to paint themselves up the vast grey
building’s side. But the image never sticks
and they fly by again: living, rising brushes.

The crows are smaller and smug in the distance,
racing up and meeting their shadow-selves
in the sky. But they can’t streak it either, great
horizontal slab a block long, metal tunnel
disgorging ships, wall of wind gathered and pressed
flat and swung up perpendicular to the water.

Into this both crows and gulls slam their shadows,
scrape them up its sides, sweep them back down
again, day after day of invisible avian ink making
time itself the paint against the wall, a streaked
and graven web of swift calligraphy.