Ponderable polemics, poetic

WordPress site of poet Mark Lucker

youth

  • Traveling

    On family trips when I was eight, nine plastic, primary-color cowboys, Indians, soldiers, animals fought and romped in a synthetic, nappy, dark-blue rear-window battlefield meadow Other times, it was a fuzzy ledge on which to lean, and watch the road fading, while my mother half-jokingly admonished me to turn around, see where I was going, Read more

  • Old growth

    At age seven I nearly killed the pubescent birch tree anchoring our Minneapolis backyard stripping it of all its bark, roots to four feet up – the physical limits of my fanciful reach As Mrs. Kime’s most intrepid first-grader I planned to build a birch bark canoe, ala the Chippewa we were studying, but my Read more

  • No French Cuffs

    Plaid flannel shirts of my Northwoods youth smelled of beer and pine cones boat motor gasoline and fresh caught sunfish wood smoke and filtered Winstons when I was a kid the intertwined, pungent aromas of cervelat salami plumbers’ grease, house paint mingled freely, locked in square-patterned fibers, always-rolled-up sleeves no amount of Fels-Naptha soap could Read more

  • Breezes

    summer comes to a close autumnal breezes waft rustling memories of those days when the close of summer had more definitive endings sun-drenched days of youthful frolic, innocent play, done swimming, playing with frogs in holes dug on sandy beaches at grandparent’s homes; ‘the lake’ summer Xanadus of childhood one year, scenic backdrops for advancing Read more

  • 33 (For Johnny)*

    Twenty-one years was not nearly enough; we had just embarked when you left. Thirty-three years is not nearly enough to erase what is indelibly sketched not a pencil caricature, a dimly recollected photographic snapshot or grainy home movie just you, at nineteen, before illness rudely smudged and dog-eared the picture you are smiling, damn it Read more

  • First dance

    A ma-and-pa resort, small lake north woods of Minnesota small office behind quaint bar, twelve small cabins dozen aluminum rowboats to use; minnows, worms, leeches for sale amenities, ala Angler’s Edge Joe & Gloria’s place The bar a hangout for township locals grandpa Ivar and I frequented the nicked, cigarette-burn speckled polished, yellow-varnished bar for Read more

  • Waiting for Felix

    Quintessentially American; refrigerator door Louvre stylistically Picassoesque, Daliesque though Dadaism and Mamaism predominate as pudgy-finger tempera on newsprint evolved into more complex designs, bolder expressions of the artists vision in markers on white paper, macaroni on tag board, leaves melted in wax paper Like any good museum, the exhibits rotate; handsomely, haphazardly framed via magnets-on-white-enamel Read more

  • Art of Flying

    Flights of fancy via wings of balsa when an extra nickel added a propeller we took wing on wind-looping imagination gliding sometimes to gentle landings more often crashing with aplomb-tinged disappointment when repairs were beyond the pale Images silently soaring, frozen in in time and flight still life, real life in balsa and backyard – Read more

  • 33 (For Johnny)*

    Twenty-one years was not nearly enough; we had just embarked when you left. Thirty-three years is not nearly enough to erase what is indelibly sketched not a pencil caricature, a dimly recollected photographic snapshot or grainy home movie just you, at nineteen, before illness rudely smudged and dog-eared the picture you are smiling, damn it Read more

  • Manly

    At eight-years old machismo has a very different feel ‘Don’t cry like a baby,’ my son would admonish his second-grade peers ‘…cry like a man!’ As he is now sixteen I wonder…would he challenge them at all? Read more