Request for David Tucker

[pyreneeees.livejournal.com]

Hi! I just discovered David Tucker and he is wonderful. Does anyone happen to have a copy of "Detective Story," which begins, "Happiness is a stubborn old detective who won’t give up on us/though we have been missing a long, long time"? 

In exchange, here is another of his poems. Wonderful.

The Dancer

by David Tucker

Class is over, the teacher

and the pianist gone,

but one dancer

in a pale blue

leotard stays

to practice alone without music,

turning grand jetes

through the haze of late afternoon.

Her eyes are focused

on the balancing point

no one else sees

as she spins in this quiet

made of mirrors and light—

a blue rose on a nail—

then stops and lifts

her arms in an oval pause

and leans out

a little more, a little more,

there, in slow motion

upon the air.

The Continuous Life, Mark Strand

[moireach.livejournal.com]

The Continuous Life
Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.