jaseur d’Amérique

Aaron Tucker

you are a cedar waxwing perched & watching

the sharp thrust of your beak, the black white mask around your eyes

your sun chest radiates, then gradates down to a silky silver

the tips of your wings & tail feather electric with bright yellow

you grip the branch with one foot, the sweet of your berrymeal

& the stick of sap satiates you, you are patient, watch the couple

& you call to them, sree, because the rain has stopped, because they are together

sweew, your clear whistle punctuates their pause, their kiss



you are a cedar waxwing, luminous & startling, you nest & trill

along the Don River, carry shreds of leaves, lint, branches, twine, pixilation

watch Necropolis neighborgraves one day, the pair of horses the next

you make your home along the water because it grows the best berries

& it calms you, it is a familiar force that beacons always

but when the chill of oncoming snow descends, the trees made barren

your migratory path away carries you south, & you join tens, hundreds, thousands

a flyway, you find your own kind & fly in a tracking formation, you boldly near the tip 

to middle America, you glide over Iowa Farmfields, oceans of oranged harvest

you move over the expressways that fill Kansas City, Wichita & Tulsa

your sky traffic mirrors the ground movements, updrafts, your flock a group vehicle

you rest on telephone poles, silhouettes against sunset & electricity hum underwire

perhaps you rest for a season in Laredo, deep in Texas, nest & trill

you build from shreds of agave, spores, turtleweed, light, buffalograss

you are a mutihome cedar waxwing, without a long-distance migratory genealogy

you do not move south to breed or settle, but rather because that is where

nourishment is, where the winter is not, & so you return, repeat, loop

while some of your flock continue north, following the expansion

of exotic fruiting plants, following the traces of berries all the way to the Yukon

maybe even to Whitehorse, where you grew up before leaving for Ottawa

but you come back to the Don River, renest at your riverhome, grow comfortable

you complete your clockwise migration by closing the circle, return   




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 Gaes of Marcel Duchamp (Bookthug) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly inema studies monographs, Virtual Weaponry: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood ar Films and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (both published by Palgrae Macmillan). His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into culptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the o-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chespoetry.com). Currently, he is an uninvited guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, were he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto), teachig creative and academic writing. He will be beginning his doctorate as an Elia Scholar in he Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University.