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    Bonsai Love
    Bonsai Love
    Bonsai Love
    Ebook87 pages36 minutes

    Bonsai Love

    By Diane L Tucker

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    About this ebook

    Diane Tucker’s Bonsai Love is an eloquent book of poems about the sensual delicacy of love. Carefully pruned, intricate in design, and sensitive to intrusion, these poems create an image of intimacy through reflection and in relation to nature, the universe, music, literature and art.

    The voice that comes forth is one of self-doubt seeking reassurance: Who wouldn’t want her whole self rehearsed/from top to bottom, in every key, before being/laid down to rest in a marigold velvet bed?” It is a voice of caring and passion that seeks details (Your hands have all the right calluses,/rough and smooth in the proper harmony”) as well as larger philosophical answers (You like the stars best:/once known, they stay the same.”). Bonsai Love is a discovery of love in all levelsa deep investigation of what it means to care and be cared for. In the end, the author does not settle on simple answers: This heart is heavy to lift but small enough/to pocket and hide.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarbour Publishing
    Release dateJun 15, 2015
    ISBN9781550176445
    Bonsai Love

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      Book preview

      Bonsai Love - Diane L Tucker

      Prologue: Eve as rib

      If time could be wound back before clock,

      before sundial, almost before sun,

      I’d spend a day, if I could, as your rib,

      suspended awhile before God drew me out.

      You stand after a strenuous morning of naming,

      the unnamed still rubbing themselves

      against your calves in the wordless new air.

      You stretch and spread your fingers

      across me while gazing into the distance

      at that blueness we’ll call mountains.

      A big sheepish sort of creature rubs

      against you then, and so against me,

      both of us poked, both nudged for a name

      or for its absence, not even this beast

      wanting words right now, no word to slip

      like a waxy leaf between it and its beginning.

      Your hand still spread-eagled along my length,

      they dawn on you, dawn in you: hunger and thirst.

      So I help hold you in and up all the way

      to the water and the fruit; I hang there,

      stretched piece of your heart’s bone-basket,

      spine-sconced white hook, marrow-cored

      blood coffer cuddling a lung in the dark.

      When, that night, you lay down to sleep,

      there’s an insomniac hour. A sensation

      we’ll later, together, name pain licks your side.

      Brand new, it keeps you awake but somehow

      isn’t unpleasant yet. You press your hand against

      the place that seems to pulse the strange feeling.

      Pain, unfallen, is your body making ready.

      You become sure of this. You careen toward sleep

      curled around the place, both hands clutching it.

      Something is going to happen, you think,

      when the sun burns and I make words again

      for the creatures. Perhaps (your last waking thought)

      I’ll hear the sound of my own name spoken

      at last by one of these wandering beasts?

      Biology Class

      The circulatory system of the rat was too small,

      arteries thready and ruinable by study, so they

      shipped us bullfrogs. These ones three times

      the size of the rats, their Louisiana hearts big enough,

      their veins and valve connections more visible.

      On each frog’s belly, cuts had been made

      that opened its torso like a book, front cover

      and back, and its story was all there on one deep page.

      We read it from beginning to end, the blood chapter,

      anyway (though all their blood had been poured out

      to keep the lab clean, dissectors’ hands unstained).

      In the lab’s remaining minutes we could read

      whatever else of the frog we wanted; so we read

      the food chapter, our scalpels tracing slits

      across each beastie’s tightly packed stomach,

      and there (book within a book!) curled a crayfish

      bigger than a big man’s thumb, its many legs

      and eyes on stalks perfectly preserved as well,

      swallowed but not a jot digested.

      Poor bullfrog (or not, his last moments spent

      snagging and slurping down this fine crustacean

      filet), guts up on the lab bench, his elegantly curved

      chin a dead, shiny grey in the flat classroom light.

      What would we, the dissectors, divulge

      from our dark body cavities if you got us pinned

      to that waxen slab? What would you

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