Duluk's "Scattered Gutters" retells the old story of sun and moon as a family drama, with a faintly hungover cosmos. The sun reaches across city streets, country roads and island retreats looking for "the slender hand he so longed to hold." Finding no one "worth" the day, he reclines "to reflect on Cabernet" and hands the search to his son, the moon, who "with his father's borrowed light / patrols the undeserted streets at night." The second stanza follows that pale arm through alleys, under bridges, into bars and theatres. It finds nothing "on earth" or "through the sea" to rival "her infinitely finite blue supply / of cloud-swept grace and star-borne flare." The poem never says who "her" is. The likeliest reading is the sky itself, which the sun has left behind as "emaciated" in his hunt for an earthly hand. If so, the search ends in a quiet irony: what he was neglecting was the best thing available.
The poem's shape supports this. The first stanza is a single, breathless sentence strung on "and... and... and," with a storyteller's old-fashioned cadence. "Stretched forth his orange-yellow hand" sounds almost scriptural. The lines break on small, hesitant words ("and / followed," "so / longed," "his / desired worth"), so the syntax seems to reach past each line ending, as the sun's arm reaches past the horizon. The rhythm is loose and unmetered until the stanza closes on a neat couplet, "light" and "night." The moon's job sounds tidy and mechanical, a night shift. The second stanza holds its rhyme back even longer. "Sea," "supply" and "sky" chime, and then "compare" locks with "flare." Order arrives only when the poem reaches the thing it prizes.
The imagery rests on contrasts of colour, class and scale. The sun's "orange-yellow hand" meets the moon's "pale arm," and warmth gives way to borrowed coolness. The sun "groomed the city streets," a gentle verb that makes light a comb running through hair. The moon's world is grubbier: "beer-glass broken gutters," "cardboard beds," "over-populated three-in-the-morning bars." Cabernet against beer sets the sun up as a remote, comfortable aristocrat who delegates the dirty work to his son. "Reflect" is a good double meaning. The sun reflects in the sense of thinking, while the son reflects in the sense of mirroring.
The wordplay is worth lingering on. "Undeserted" streets are populated, but the word also sits next to "undeserved," as if the night-time city were a place of unearned grace. "Those sound awake and sleeping" twists "sound asleep," so that even waking people seem half-dreaming. The moonlight "filtered" through them, sifting the crowd like a sieve. The poem's first person arrives only once, in "our simple heads," and the plural is disarming. The speaker is one of the people being searched, a little exposed, perhaps a little flattered. "Infinitely finite" is the boldest phrase. It suggests a beauty that feels endless but is also a "supply," something that can run out. That fits the word "emaciated" and hints that the sky's generosity is fragile.
The subtitle, "Variation on a familiar theme," invites us to hear the poem as music played on a known tune. The tune is the old human habit of looking elsewhere for beauty. Some readers may also hear an echo of the well-known line about people in the gutter looking at the stars. Here the gutter is where the moon looks and the stars are what he comes home to.
What makes the poem interesting is how it mixes registers. Grand mythic machinery of gods, fathers and sons meets bar-room detail, and neither cancels the other. It doesn't sneer at the street. The moon walks through the broken glass gently, and his arm "crept softly." But it still insists that the sky wins the comparison. The ambiguity of "her" is part of the pleasure, because the reader has to complete the story the sun never does.