Old News, New Wounds

Violence as a uterus keeps giving birth.
When did death become old news,
one bomb a full mosquito net
that multiplies and multiplies.
The front page, a grave among graves,
anonymous sorrows, limp remains
of ocean kelp clinging to inconsolable rock.
The haggard face of Khalid Mohammed
is plastered on the headline news.
His acorn eyes, the tendered jewels
of writhing snakes still at large.
Hissing lips with secrets stowed.

What happened to reporting joy?
My stanzas follow ugly suit.
I start a line with butterflies
and end with nothing but the husk.
I watch mine sink like wedding rings
in long, hard colons of pipes.
Retrieval ought to be my task.
Waters of seas are icing my hands.
Another woman's son I know
is putting on his army digs.
She sees it as a sinful shade of green,
palette of approaching storm,
this bloodshed in the painter's tray.

Mothers all across the world are tight
inside this taffy pull of pride and horror.
At Toys R Us, the sale of tiny tanks is up.
The rising stock of hopelessness
that makes us arch what bows we have.
Children pose the chilling question:
"When is Daddy coming home?"
A globe of fading picotees.
Borders dark, uncrossable.
Torn white lace of coming spring
so evident in cloying frost,
I wonder if the shirt will last.
Who will slash the canvas next?

The All-night Diner

Is a sad poem of twilight
hanging on to some ray, any ray
called luminescence
in the licorice black world --

the waitress is tweaking a nipple
or two for a better tip
and the tipper is tired
of money that buys bad news --

cold coffee, burned toast
and a morning paper
with coupons removed
by desperate fingers that could be his.

An old RCA recites the drum tap
of coming war and gun control falls
into the syrup pitcher -- dries up
like a dead gnat --

the blizzard is settling in
and love that never made it to bed
is angsty and sour,
trapped in the wait --

duct tape grows scarce
at the five and dime next door.
Did I hear you say --
"There is a door, a way out."

Come sit in my booth,
rub my knotted neck,
hold my reed-like hands
that have all but lost --

the music
meant to be
this
page.

***First Published in _Megaera_

Hail

I trudge the cemetery hill
as if each step disturbs the earth.
Rain falls in little knives,
ravens hooking into flesh.
How dark and sharp
this world is without you here.
On Mother's Day, my favorite color
is black, for it is the hue
admitting my place among
the coins of unseen stars.
Father's the falcon sweeping
plates of cobalt skies,
some wounded hide of memory
between his jaws, this cache of grief
for which we have no real words.
Every page, the stirred mirage,
comes back the match
that drowned in blood.

My questions hide like frightened mice
in a lipstick painted shell --
searching sly epiphany,
saddled with the idle curse
of ten round, burning fingertips
losing at the guessing game.
Even yellow daffodils on banks of grass
don't last in ice this hard.
Your grave is plain gray rock,
a brittle scone without warm tea.
My hunger seems appropriate,
its echo silenced by his hurt.
I ask a vacant sheet of white
how one makes peace with nothingness.
Each footprint stomping a tear
like beetles squirt under a shoe.
My hands are maps without a line.
Each riddled verse --
a despicable space ahead of no phrase.

If Only

A hospital chart blames
cancer for this vacancy --
this diary that has no words.
Of course I've made you a goddess
cloaked in shimmering white.
Athena in her Parthenon
while I was fumbling stray stones.
Angel with an eagle's width
ardent enough to split gray clouds.
When nests are empty straw,
a child searches sky and earth
for semaphores of missing birds.
One feather of a memory is all I ask.
One signature to study for its fatal curve
that made my father love you so
he couldn't learn to speak again.

This -- our mother/daughter doom,
your grave, my longing's gravity.
Our doors with knobs of polished brass
forever bolted from the light.
Oasis and mirage with thorns
of fingers I have never touched.
Show me just one lipstick mark,
one footprint in the dizzy sand,
and I will write from there toward joy.
If only is a phrase that bleeds
on every snowy page.
Iambic chants, ibids of wish,
sweaters with holes and no arms,
moths of a quill with nothing to chew.
This concert needs some instrument.

First published in The Green Tricycle

Cold Rice

The corridor is trimmed by rails
and welcome signs --
purple posters of a flower framed
by the fat white lie of:
"living here is not so bad."
Paper is squared, hidden by glass
to keep your arrowed fingertips
from scratching at the page this is.
They dropped you off like shaggy strays
that mess up vinyl in a car,
pee on rugs, bark a lot, dig a hole
their eyes refuse to run across
or patch with more than writing checks.
Your body has battle fatigue --
your mind, a warrior way too bright
to be in a place where
where moonlight is florescent bulbs
above the jail of a bed.
A snowfall sticks like cold white rice.

Every palm that passes over
wrinkled flesh wears rubber gloves.
Touch, a distant memory.
The garden beat, empty but for
gangly shrubs, a tulip stalk
afraid to usher in the spring.
A splintered bench with
garbage from the midnight shift,
reminding you of trellises where roses
leaned to kiss warm rain.
We cannot own the mortal cliff --
and so we build "facilities,"
give them names that
shine with old clichés of peace.
You're grateful for a window seat;
but death itself would be the bird.
Who wouldn't want to leave this pan.

***First Published in _Megaera_

In Pieces

Old age hits and the globe
shrinks to a tattered sock.
We speak of little, words are few --
speak about the dimming light,
ice cream turning sour milk,
green grass a field of merciless weeds.
Spun too hard, spun too long, you separate --
I cannot remember when rivers
were whole and vaulting the rocks.
This is a locker for going hides;
our seaside chats have turned
to the beachable whale.
I visit like fudge melting
in the back seat of a hot sedan --
intentions sweet and neatly carved,
truth a dark and poignant mess.

A thin CD of Grieg bellows
through ammonia halls.
Warning cones caution those,
those who have remaining eyes --
"floors are slick," as if I didn't
get the point, die a little with each hour.
The somber moment is pinned
to the glass like a crushed gnat.
Your housecoat is worn,
with cigarette burns and buttons loose,
dignity crashing in bricks.
Castle and queen are down
to the stump of a once rich life.
Flesh becomes plebian wool.
All my hands and all my ink can't
buy you a forest revved by summer rain.

Par for the closing game,
one grave, then another, then more --
the Domino slide. The End, distinct
as black and white photography.
Windows are portals rubbing in the other side,
cracked mirrors of fond memory.
The trees could be our fishing poles.
Every sadness is a twig
night will crunch and cast away.
Oatmeal with a cardboard crust
is wet concrete you laugh about.
I stir the quicksand once and sigh,
brought down by unchangeable tides
in an ocean of permanent salt.
I come with drooping irises
from a garden in which you knelt
to plant the redeemable root.
I set them on a bed stand square,
an elegy for better times
when swans once owned the drying lake.

***First Published in _Megaera_

Sharp Ice

Your hair was the color of pearls,
but I didn't think they were real.
I couldn't admit to the ash
of your skin, its porcelain pose
on saucers of graves.
Two long days beside your bed.
A cradle I pushed but could not rock.
My eyes were grabbing renaissance.
I knew it but I acted blind.

You warned me of death and its salt --
how oceans are garnished with thirst.
You taught me how to rope and rise
a baby grand from dining rooms
of buried ships -- and still I
painted ivory keys of fingernails
neon shades of busy lies
with no respect for waning light.
A wish was stepping on my hands.

Too young to abide the wrinkling fruit,
I wasn't prepared for the rind.
"Consider a storm the polish of craft,
expect the ice to be sharp" -- you said,
but I sat deaf ten miles away.
I should have been there,
when the clock of your heartbeat stopped --
darning a prayer for the size of the hole,
as lungs collapsed like old cocoons.

The Empty Bed

"When you sleep in your clothes, it's not really sleep,
it's waiting for dark to be light."

Jennifer Lauck

That's how we were. Never quite safe.
I'd sleep in a robe up to my chin
clamped on the cotton like Tupperware lids.
Summer moons were cashew curls
outside the drapes. Whole and plump,
beyond the arduous reach.
I wonder now, these acres
of a queen-sized bed seem
to house jesters in black and white
mocking my rivers of blood.
The mattress is smiling
with lines of our lies --
their garlic still fresh
as witches we were.

Under my ribs, the fist and the vein
consider this sorrow a home.
Crushing the acorn at dusk
does nothing to center a sickly tree.
The forest forgetting the snow
will have to remain a journey of suns
rolling their pennies over the ice.
My reading lamp extends it arm --
its shadow makes war like a sword.
Mud packs ride my tired eyes;
I finger a sonnet of lace where
strangling roots once choked the dirt.
Next I'll braid the scrawny daisies
stripped of oblong ivory.
I've folded the lips of new sheets --
pretty side up --
replaced the pillows you weren't.

Better Grass

"I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me..."

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

All said, done, buried but creeping back
in velvety mink, bleu nightshade
with stripes of light from a moon
that lied about the reef it was.
The amorous -- immersion foot --
swell as pure as the sore.
We called dry pastures a bed.
I'm ash and I'm remembering
red tips of a poignant flame
extinguished by selfish mist.
I'll feed you to the hungry goats.
They eat whatever
comes close to their teeth.
Gales to goats -- so clever,
so wise, alliterative --
as if I am dusting the dust.

I'll run to the stream to rinse off wish.
Begin again in better grass,
unyellowed by peine forte et dure.
The choir is only a rasp for now.
Eliot's arid plain is coming to be
the page we deserve.
Over the shoulder the desert and rune --
the salt and the stone
with coiling snakes
that make such lousy braids of love.
I will prove Diogenes wrong.
His lantern will yield a street
befitting the sonnet and dream.
At packing time, your shirts
still smell of aftershave and I inhale
as I fold your sleeves in envelopes.
A feather of song waits
on the tip of a wounded wing.
I'll learn to spread daisies over the bruise --
draw fine black lines
between oasis and quickened sand.

The Wasteland Where Your Body Slept

In the wake of serpentine limos,
saccharine cards, carnation fields
arranged just so, the water
in Simon's pond went black.
Our house grew laughless, tombstone cold --
spiders ran their gamuts of lace.
It was 1959 -- computers hadn't been born,
so Daddy deleted our stringless harps
with gin or a beer, something with ice
and a fragrance that stung.
I sensed it was our medicine.
I thought I should learn to pour.

Sunday was our lazy hour --
a game of camping under sheets.
The mattress seemed a vacant lot
some CAT had cleared by accident.
Lip of the cotton always infused
with the liquid of eyes.
Exhausted from spearing
unspearable moods like silver trout.
He sent me out to hunt a bear.
My tiny hands came back
with one of your socks still smelling
of leather in shoes that were gone.

I boxed your pillow with a fist
until the feathers left in air
like blackbirds struck by B-B guns.
Father's bed, a wasteland now
where bridges of touch
seemed useless iron.
With rivers dry, no wonder
the lake of our chatter was low.
At barely four, I ran my digits
over the lumps of crumbling coal.
Found rattling gourds of his arms
reaching for flesh in a grave.

Thanatopsis

"Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him."

E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

Time just broke like fishing twine.
Fear became our very breath.
A book louse eating scrolls
of prayer and sacks of flour.
Death's dirty needle struck our veins.
Drip. March. Drip. March.
Ash, thick, ash; smoke, dense smoke.
The ground sits like a friar's cape,
dormant and rough, coveting
these nervous metrics,
gnawing reefs of labial coral --
pink, inviting, cognizant
of circles coming to their ends.
I'm counting on the sun to climb,
but all my eyes are focusing
on what's inside a passing cloud.
Ground hogs say the winter
still has tricks ahead.

Spring just swerves from lane to lane.
Terror and its ventifact
rattled all our absolutes,
froze whatever arrogance.
It's up to touch to bring
this glacier to its knees.
Shadowboxing hatred's wind is testing us.
Seas seem larger than the swim.
How much muscle do I own?
Will urning the dead,
slipping change in widowed pockets,
give this earth its wholeness back?
Will listening stop mourning bells?
Will faith in little things return?
Will questions plain exhaust their curves?
Too late to plant a tulip bulb, my mother warns.
I stand, boot on shovel's razor edge,
insisting I can split the stone.

Those Granted Legs

Windows down, his seatbelt
sleeping on the floor,
her boyfriend drives the curve,
half high on her scent,
her nonchalance and ivory feet
vernal as harbored lily cones
on mornings of a wedding day.
She crosses her legs like clicking spoons,
flips ten toes of crocus red
over the hump of the door.
They don't expect a rearview mirror
from pickup trucks to come so close.
Seasons seem an unmussed quilt
as cherry blossoms pile up.
They're far too young and supple now
to dabble in the nightmare's velvet
fidgeting in front of them.
Ruffled lust is all they know.
Snow and ice seem far away.

No kidney stones have split and passed.
Reports that blare on radios from
NPR in Israel are little dots
like blackbird eyes
on other soiled continents.
She doesn't retract her china toes.
"Dreams don't break," her mother said,
"unless you drop them on their heads."
She trusts the wind to dry her sweat,
keep the beads of rosaries
from rolling off a jagged cliff.
Fate will push her feet back in,
or cut them off exposing bone,
but the gleam of the steel axe
is still the silver, naive sword
in pastures of a Camelot.
She knows no limits to the thread --
the one some god will someday push
through needles of a coming grave.

Bottle Conch

The easy way -- the guzzle
of ether smoothing
the somewhat wrinkled skirt.
The in-between
where art of grief
was a painting that never
quite dried or found a frame
or lifted rocks, discovered
the slug or the snake coiled
about the gasping neck.

Never so high you lost your job.
Never so low you hurled
hatred at the walls.
Never so high you struck a cheek.
Never so low you traded
soups cans for a beer.
Never so high you crashed a car.
Never so low you fired a gun,
shattered temples of the certain.
Always secret, always silent
always hidden suffering.

I followed your subtle lead:
look to a glass to bury the chill,
wander a city of bright, brash lights.
Listen to the bottle's conch
to tell you you're safe,
lifted from a diary of
strata and scar
above the purple bulging vein.
A softer life where sad gets drunk.
And the river's wound runs its course
under the wobbling bridge.

Capers Scattered on a Grave

I imagine you wearing down
like thinning soap in gutters
of the silent streets.
Whites of your marble eyes
stained by the wasted blood.
Afraid to pick up the phone,
but wearing its cell
in case some lover perishes
and you will be needed
to bury her bones -- to play
the omnipotent brick
in toppled clay.

Taking sides is trying on a pair
of slacks a size too large,
a size too small --
hatred doesn't fit your skin.
Seasons go "on hold" in smoke.
It's April here. In Israel,
the winter wins
as terror spreads
like cold dark borscht.

I fear for you -- for sprigs
along an olive branch
that look like scraps
of gray barbed wire.
The way this war is heating up
there's no such thing
as unmolested marigolds --
their capers scattered on a grave.

In Bethlehem

In Bethlehem, the sign of the cross
is surrounded by smoke.
Streets are empty melon rinds.
Tanks roll their pockmarks
over clay and no one dares
to break the curfew with a smile
or walk the dust
cemented in a coming grave.
Sacred hymns these wretched hours
in hissings made of rifle fire.

I know three poets in this jail --
no psalms in palms but grief itself.
Standing, Helen Keller style,
deaf and blind beneath
a church's balding dome,
passion in an organ's rumble,
tactile barbs from a knotty fence
they didn't build, they didn't wire,
but feel just like dripping blood.

Over here -- a Christmas carol
seems lamely joyous,
helpless in its practiced score.
Licking wounds with crimson terror
does nothing to remove the stain.
Guns reduce a child's eyes
to cherry pits that never
witness redder fruit.

Vile tantrums, ancient grudges
take their tolls, leave the earth
a tortoise shell where heads
are hiding from the air.
Photos of a gutted wall
in gray/brown stone
to symbolize religion's mule
in black and white
that hauls no peaceful olive branch.

Grandfather's Chair

Children have taken the cache,
divided the china
plate by plate, cup by cup.
Here is the room where you
slept away your midnight fights,
dreamt of her flannel paving your skin.
Gazed at the window and yearned.
Only an armchair remains.
It knows you in ways I don't.
Thorns of your spine,
the smell of your pipe.
Blossoms of dandruff and oil.
Sawdust and hate no one could see.

It carries the gist of the curve,
the weight of the sag.
Stuffing of polluted songs.
Birdseed specks and cinnamon crumbs.
The creak of your knees
succumbing to rust.
Newsprint and black ink lies
mixed with tea stains,
bourbon beads you snuck
and sipped when backs were turned.

The pillows of Grammy's hands
salving the hours ticking toward graves.
A crochet hook between
the cushion's patulous seams.
She must have been poised on your lap.
Forgotten her work, made you her yarn,
skipped a stitch, gone for touch.
Under the cushion sit four worn squares
from Scrabble games:
vole, elvo, ovel -- hmmm --
guess again, says memory.

So This is What a Lattice Does

On a beauty parlor's cushioned chaise,
my hair is something to fret about.
Too long. Too short.
Graying at its frowning temple,
thinking of its aging rites.
In struts the subject of a poem:
a tall man walking his palsied son
with the tops of his shoes,
hugging his back, his curvature,
as if that body is his own.
His arches spoons of cherishing.
The child beeps and grunts,
but doesn't speak.
Silence squeaks on shiny floors.

I try not to look at my role
in his life, my mirror stones
of quietude and worthlessness.
He is crammed in closets
of my unwilling eyes, burning
from retracted light.
His pain a pile of dirty laundry
needing bleach and cherry hands
that aren't too weak to share their strength.
I imagine his soul as a nut to crack
some pen will leave like peanut shells.
There are no pageants in this play.
Just dialogues between the hurts.

I dwell on times my father stood
at feet of stairways, sighing deeply
at my frame, my eggplant stump
his purple passage to some pit
where godlessness was packed with snakes
he couldn't catch and couldn't shoot.
Still the suffering is shared.
So this is what a lattice does
determined it can grow a rose,
meekly raising dingy shades
on trials of this destiny.

The Tragic Anniversary

Six months down the gruesome road
of licking flames, of crashing towers --
nightmares swell like tumors
in a uterus too close to the child of grief
for scalpels of prayer to slice and lift.
I count 81 flags on a two-mile path.
One of them, broad banners
on an old man's scooter
painted the color of vanquished blood.
Cherry blossoms fall like snow.

The stoplight gives me time to think.
Innocence is not the silk it used to be.
Traffic moves as if it's drugged.
I watch him cross, scribble notes
across a crushed deposit slip.
Perhaps the bank is fuller now,
as we recall they took a sense,
entitlement says NPR
through speakers on the radio.
Pulled the rug, the table's cloth --
certain dishes shattered in uncertain ash.

Hands inside his winter gloves,
tender spikes of fingers curled
to make the reach his legs refuse.
Tossled hair of gray-white steel,
his Brillo zest scraping
at the scattered stones
that should have settled differently.
The cloth he waves,
symbiosis large as pride
inside the final withering.
His tires tired, still rolling
forward on the walk --
as he recalls another war
with swastikas for evening stars.

Rivers of Distinguishing

There are streaks of coal gray
in ringlets of an aging wish.
Teeth flash cavities of void.
I wonder, should I pull decay or live
with nerves smitten by denial's freeze.
Err on rainbow sides of trust.
Put away the mockeries of black baboons
swinging from the Brillo trees
in jungles raining Chardonnay.
Embrace the state's geography
that comes with full reciprocals.
Shall I stay, embedded in our silences,
or go where conches hear me scream?

Here with you in basements
flooded by a keg, I hate myself
for reaching for that unmet kiss
which lingers on old longing's tongue.
I play with rocks too big to lift.
All our truths, a contact lens
lost but swimming all the same
in rivers of distinguishing.
I claw at blind disciple faith
same as cats attack a screen --
in hunger for plain nourishment.

On the road, my eyes approach
a messy sticker, edges torn:
"Live love before you're balding eagles
staring straight at flight's demise."
Conclusions rectify their paths;
deafness seems despicable.
I wash a set of dirty slippers
shuffling in heritage.
Fluff them dry to meet a dream.
Plunge myself in fragrances.
See this joy as sweaters
warming spine and flesh
my soul refuses to return.

by Janet I. Buck

Owning Bitter Silences

There comes a dragonish time
when truth must shed its crimson fire.
Take owning of Antigones,
break poor rules, wear its pulse
on tattered sleeves.
Stains and all, blood crust crying out
in red for lift above a cherub renaissance.
Its content fresh but dubious.
My nerves claw at the screen.
I whine into deaf ear.

You will stew here
in a valley of putting greens
manicured like pretty nails.
Surface chatter rattling its hailstones
on pool halls of silences.
In the thrashing of splitting corks,
bottle caps for Sunday bonnets,
Mother's migraines will be
waiting in the cold sheets.
Last night's wine, barking at brain's thick door.
A blanketing lie to keep you warm.

Meanwhile, I fuss with the cradle
of a soul speaking its first word.
Scribble myself like earth worms in spring dirt.
Move full amaryllis bulbs from closet dark,
spread their roots, replant a girth of joy
outside the corset of our ways.
You might wonder, you might not.
You might ask, but I won't hope
for questions to erupt and dance.
"Why leave this climate stocked
with festive scented pines?" And I will say:
"If clouds had valves, you'd shut them down."

by Janet I. Buck

Sine Qua Non

Liquor picks our pockets.
I cannot recall an evening's moon
without its Cyclops biting dream.
Check the ground like homeless men
sift through alleys of the grit
for scraps of copper suns intact,
some wealth that might be hiding there.
I blame the bottle for our flaws,
their bobbins knotted at specious hour
whenever a cork or can is close.
You drift in clouds of sine qua non.
Tables set with solid silver
free of tarnish spoon a lie.
We're trading tears for Chardonnay
that could be crystal waterfalls.

We've stoned our voices crying out.
A beer stands tall, foamed in facile Ivory Soap.
On shopping trips, I wander down
a grocery aisle with rusted wheels,
marbles of forgiving weak
on rosaries with brittle strings.
Just once I ask if we could go without a goblet
packed with rivers born of toxins
poisoning a moment's earth.
The question thins like vapor trails
above the runways of our choice.
Linguistics of denial reign.

My books are coasters for a glass.
Their cherub bindings never broken by your eyes.
Their cords detached from renaissance.
We've pickled those affluent dawns
that come with blizzards, thunderheads.
My soberness is just a prude
in prunes of livers locked into their own demise.
This loneliness, a damp receipt I toss aside,
wrinkle in a bitter fist.
And we address our saddle sores
by riding into nothingness.

by Janet I. Buck

Marbles Rolling Toward the Light

I'm dreaming of a moving van;
wheels are turning as I sleep.
Guilt soaks through my paper skin,
burns its paint like acetone.
I am moths that bat their wings
in closets of a cashmere life.
Eating all the wool we are,
whining that Euterpe's harp of joy
was dropped and languishes,
sits note-less in comparisons.
"Here" is loaded wishing wells
that rule with their 80 proof.
"There" is moisture glistening, discovering
the cant and operas of it all,
the channels of clear river beds.

As hearths go, our ash is cold.
I toss it over shouldered bruise.
I want wood, stacked for winter's
snow ahead, even when the splinters slip
inside emotion's swollen thumb.
One mother holds a goblet's stem,
and asks for more relieving juice.
The other pushes rolling pins
as if the sugar of the world
is made to keep and pass around
between the lines of suffering.

One sister lights up living rooms;
the other dusts its furniture.
One father steps on missing toes
with mute dismissal's semi-truck.
The other takes their voids in stride,
looks beyond a body's carp.
Explaining this in fractured terms,
I'll tell you we have better jobs,
since we don't speak of loneliness,
of worms inside an apple's ball.
The contrast here between
a greenhouse and the earth.
Marbles scoot without my hands
toward avenues that catch the light.

by Janet I. Buck

Pennies in a Petty Jar

Booze and chatter parry levelers of grief.
Eyes play hooky from the dark;
in between the lines of fog
and sips of artificial grace,
we lose the gist of orange juice,
its pulp and seed an entity to strain,
remove, bury in our absolut.
Just once I'd like a sober meal --
where we aren't yellow rubber gloves
afraid to break a fingernail
that catches on unseemly truth,
where tears aren't silent acetone.
Borrowed smugness, false release.
Czar of liquor loads the dawn.
It rearranges furniture
but never scrubs a dirty floor.

Talking turns to stocks and bonds,
the rising price of paper towels.
Twists again in jagged knife
to runways in a fashion show.
Food grows cold and Mother asks
for just another little sip,
poison foison, grapes distilled.
Pennies in a petty jar
filling up the spreading void.
This corset for our sagging flesh --
this hill and Hell, a trip to take
on wings we trust because
they fly when we cannot.

Soapy confrontation stings;
I wash these goblets gingerly
as if they are a child's bangs,
leave you to your chosen rinse.
Wishing we could own our wrecks,
dig the glass from crimson wound,
make honesty a christening
of more than superficial lace.
I bite my tongue of fancy crystal heritage,
feel it snap like chicken wings.
Our tablecloths, a perfect press
of exit's trite menagerie.
This raw and bare, this sacred wood
that might have been a family tree
with leaves that ease a winter's ice.
I shake my fist at evenings
lost inside the blur
like trailers in a hurricane.

by Janet I. Buck

Rushing Toward Entelechy

Come sit with me, in valleys
of my shoulder blades,
whistle something in my ear
to quick correct his hollowing.
Be an owl that takes the night
and pats its haunting in a song.
Tell me straight and lovingly
that I should go from void to wealth
where speech is more than chattering --
idling in alcohol, preserving ghosts
and lies of black obsidian.
Tell me I should prop my feet,
wiggle my unpainted toes
where struggle is a loaf of bread
and every hug is trimming crusts.
Where lunch is more than padded menus
scribbled with a choice of wines.
Where aging is Vienna choirs
and harps have music in their strings.

Ahead I see a Christmas tree
of borrowed pine, its glade
and mint approachable.
Its ornaments are made and spread
by open palms rushing over river rocks
toward seas of blue entelechy.
I need to hold the raisined grape
of wisdom's aging fruit in bowls.
Crave a carriage made of wheels
beyond the rusted shaft and stone.
Dreams crawl up between the cracks
of silences and guarded ways
like earwigs pinching soul to life.
This opal set in front of me
is scooting toward a summer sun
and milking teats of miracles.
You show me portraits of a flower
and I can't live with tumbleweeds.

by Janet I. Buck

Broken Glass Mortality

Just one cell, one tiny speck in traffic veins,
we head for homes I've never had.
We're racing toward entelechy.
A wreck clots this path of edgy joy
anticipated like a kiss.
Seven cycles litter green,
their bodies sideways in the dirt.
A storm of smoke and TV crews.
My tongue goes dry;
silence smothers chatterings.
Helicopters swirl and land,
take the dead or dying flesh
to hallowed halls of medicine.
Minty straw of fresh cut grass
covered in a spray of blood
and tears of shiny watercress.
Beside the road, a patch of flowers
becomes an instant funeral pyre.

I sit and think inside this wait,
patting down my selfishness
like wild horses at a gate.
Ahead we'll have a warm embrace
closing months we've lost and left,
renewing love that needs to leave
callous closets of moot dream.
Tires screech. Sirens blare.
My voice seems illegitimate
in graveyards of another's death.
This broken glass mortality,
a sliver in myopic eyes.
A rash of rainbows made of borscht
emerging from potato clouds.
Waltz of luck a heavy leg,
a bubble on a bar of soap.

by Janet I. Buck

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At This Age

At this age, our flesh
is crumbled gingerbread
and secrets sharp as broken glass
in the small of the canyon of aching back.
In pastures of the pressing climax,
silent wind chimes gather rust,
need to swing more freely now.
I sidle up to saddle sores, sit beside
the twin-sized bed, hoping
you won't disappear before we've talked,
pierced the midnight with the sun,
drilled the limestone for regret,
comprehended all decay as if it were
a poem assigned in classrooms
spackled with the real.

Plaque and plague untouchable
will turn to cancer, heart disease.
Winter wind will strip
the summer coat of health.
At this age, comes urgency,
the kind inspiring syllables.
Motion is a greeting card
scribbled with its sly retort.
Pain, a page on every menu
fingers fail and fumble with.
Suddenly, we'll wake to things
we did not say, convey them
with the sweating glass and splintered oar
of hugging fields before they burn.
Time will be a pipe to fix
before the ocean sounds its blast,
a miracle like snowfall
sprinkled on the sand,
a pearl in a castaway.

The Hobo in a Moon's Gray Mirror

Smug in my cashmere skin,
I wander past the tarnished silver
of your flesh, drive across
its tire tracks as if
I have not put them there.
Your visage in draped odyssey
rendering reason to my pen.
You contradict the sun I know
and so I blame you on the rain.

Luckless is a fragile thing.
"Wandering stars,"
say Hebrew bibles,
"to whom is reserved the blackness
of darkness for ever."
That ebony beyond my grasp,
out of sorts on easy street.

Hobo in a moon's gray mirror,
you live in hunger's lion grip,
caught in the slash
of the crotch of death.
I paint my jagged fingernails
another shade of Revlon red,
return to sickly heritage
of classy fonts and callous hands,
scrubbing down a sewer's grate
my head has never slept upon.

Hunger’s Reach

"Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word."

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

A hundred years have flown like geese
and still the heart wind is a silent thing;
I charge myself with forgetting
to finger the pulse of pain
and be a blood bag for its cause.
Sweaty, drooping like a willow
widowed by our leather wallets
on the street, a homeless family
passes time by selling beads.
Childish fingers work the strings
as if they sense some fantasy
of prayer will reconcile their fate.
I think of lucky childhoods
where Mother posted crayon portraits
of the moon on humming fridge.
Food was there, just sitting, waiting
for a tongue to choose its candied calcium.

The reach of hunger stands before me.
Even in unsated state, it is a lyric verse
from God I ought to read but set aside.
As scripture says, "foxes have holes,
and the birds of the air have nests;
but the Son of man hath not where
to lay his head." I ought to be
erasure stubs for tragedy beyond my own.
Run a spell check on my morals,
find them gutted by mistakes.
Lions of this Narnia are splayed
on altars of my mind; action naps
so lazily, insulated by the ease.
I carry groceries from the car,
plan another useless poem,
push a button, down the door,
treat them like a cavity that stings
a second, then departs.

Haunted Halls

A cloying stroll through haunted halls.
Hospital gloom familiar as a homeless sign
on freeway curls of gravel spray.
I itch with guilt for being glad
I'm walking, limping down the path
and not in bed beside your bones.
Wind chimes in a tissued box
my husband carries as I lean--
pressure makes them tinkle some
like microphones that cough
and bristle on a stage.
We're visiting. My stomach turns.
Acrobats of all that practiced agony
in leotards of trained denial
sensing darkness closing in.

Remembering the sticky steam
off sweat and food, stifled air of urgency
slipping through the grinning cracks
of nurses on a shift assigned.
I worry they aren't spoiling you.
I comb your hair and cut your meat
as if it's time to plant a tulip in the earth,
rake thick soil of motherhood
that rooted us in confidence and stroked
our cherub dreams to sleep.
The curling iron is heating up,
conversing with the burn of doom,
as if its round had links to peace
like salesmen pushing vitamins.

Making light of aging's scorch and slipping disks.
We aren't the Frisbees that we were.
Hallmark cards are dildos for orgasmic tears
that pen their scripts behind a drape.
Wrinkles take their minor scales.
A squirt of perfume on your skin
stings where needles entered there.
Ridiculous, as answers go,
but I respect the need to reach.
I've written menus of diversion,
ordered every meal they served.
Belladonna bugle calls of telephones
remind you that your friends are here.
Your husband sits in silent tilt,
tolerant of chatting rites,
uncomfortable with torture chambers medicine
can wheel you back and forth across.
Hoping that a loving ear will be enough
to ward off demons of the drugs.
He wants a sword of surety that you will be
on ticket stubs of olding's circus,
even when the tent is folding from the rain
and time is pouring wet cement
down throats of hours
in bellies of a waiting grave.

The Gargoyle

It's half-past two,
sunny as a shiny penny
rubbing pockets of the world.
A blind man wanders
with his stick through
carnivals of urban teeth,
paper-clipping sound and sense.
Struggle in fortissimo;
every meal a rich dessert
in menus of this tragedy.
His guide will tell him
when to cross, lead him
down our sewer pipes
with pupiled pity for their scent.
Gargoyle nesting in the city,
plowing through attentive straw.
He feels the ground our luckiness
can touch and leave
without a set of firmer plans.

Focus in his fingertips like peeled
and fragrant ginger root.
His destiny reminding him
of all the sharper particles,
groping tentacles of sea,
where concentration cannot rest.
Where tactile isn't
summer hammocks
blowing in a sugared wind,
but cassocks nearer to a grave.
Where moments
don't decide themselves.
Where hearing is a hunting dog.
A victim of the buffeting:
a little closer to the conch
than normal's ease will ever be.

The Woman Who Stuck Around

It's Christmas Eve;
you are driving the long length
of a state pummeled by
rain, darkness, and fear.
To visit your mother,
who's given up her reins on life.
When you pass remainders
of riven skunks on dangerous curves,
your headlights will reflect her waste.
Your husband's mom
is dying in the hospital.
You've bathed and dressed
her swelling tumors,
combed her hair as wealthy
women brush a mink.
Bonded in the round dance
of shared grief, cradled her bones
like piles of nails falling
through a wet brown bag.

Expecting nothing in return,
you will be known as
the woman who stuck around.
The woman who lived the boil
and nursed the burn,
who saddled a horse
and rode the wind,
clichés of angels,
proving that undaunted love
means walking barefoot
through thick mud.
Someday in a far off grave,
the toe tag on your body's frame
will say: "this woman stuck around,"
shoveled banks of sorrow's snow,
even when the tulips left,
courting every hairpin turn,
gravel in her open eyes.

***For Linda Mc Donough

The Dartboard

I promised you out loud one night:
"One more round of boozing crazed,
when I forget the words I said,
I'll quit for good." Of course
that brand of reckoning
came in deuces of my flaws.
Clearer days brought jagged stars;
being clean would not suffice.
Sober was a muscle strain;
I would have to exercise,
to squeeze myself into your box,
pace the halls in expectation's army boots
as if they weren't a size too small.

When I saw dark for what it was,
depression's mallet hovering
above a sun of relevance,
I knew the juice was part to blame,
but change was never good enough.
You unpinned tresses of our woes,
served them burned in bacon curls.
Used the sharps and flats of love
like dartboards in a sleazy bar.

Brisker air of honesty
brought us to a shallow puddle
boiling in the summer's light.
I was porous circle part,
dream sachet in bedroom drawers--
losing color, scent as well,
aging in our stale perfume.
I popped the cyst of apathy,
licked our wounds, took
Windex to a grimy mirror.
Harrowing as freedom seemed,
it was our only Jericho.

Brackets of Grief

On the table sit two choices:
a pen and a bottle--both inert.
One a digger,
one a temptress of escape,
lacy music of the fog.
The old reform of alcohol,
its very blessed exit fuel--
I worshipped it to pickle ghosts
like organs saved,
preserved in bought formaldehyde.
At some weak point
it turned to water on my lungs,
stealing space of passageways.
Single brackets (not a set)
for closure's messy sewing kit.
The art of it all lost in mud,
making concrete of a sea
that needed to respect its flow.

This common pecking
writers call a smart reply
is bedsores on a busy heel,
never a ballerina's twirl
lathering some fancy stage.
Just beds in Braille
with lumps and wires,
inside elbowing the dark.
A cup of squirted beetle juice,
not the tea leaves of a sonnet
teachers always promised me.
But souls must eat a soul's remains
like chocolate bars,
even with uneven edge,
even with its broken glass,
hope like church bells
seal a prayer, his skeleton
will land upon receptive dunes
welcoming his cysts of tears.

The Death Watch

Staring at finality.
Its rash at home in confines of an ICU.
Quiet clouds of white gray paint
mixing with the cardboard air.
The station's desk seems just a subway
full of papers piled high in helplessness.
Nurses slip from room to room,
from bed to bed, as if the hands
of ticking clock are running them
through circles of a paragon
they recognize as forms of gods asleep,
snoring through this agony,
when suns should push those
cold potato moons away with silver forks
of noble gesture rusting in this universe.

Their fingers are assigned the doom,
diaper change of grief and sorrow
clinging to a cotton day.
Pinning down hot metal tears.
Rubber gloves become routine.
Rolled on thumbs like condoms over
penises in rapes of human dignity.
Staring at finality.
Rather quite the opposite.
It stares at us, sucks
the marrow from crumbled bone.
Here we have the march of self-less
starching every uniform.
Something of a person's soul
blowing sand in fragile eyes
of Faberge's on route
to some museum grave.
Determined love can intervene,
breathing hurled back and forth
like scuba divers pass the last of oxygen
in tanks imbued with fatal holes.

Beauty Marks

***Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct
and the brain can conceive beyond .... When we love a woman,
we don’t start measuring her limbs.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

So why am I measuring mine?
Or rather their absence like
rubbled remains of infamous war.
As Goncourt says,
"Beauty is what untrained eyes
consider abominable."
So the shape of this truth,
empty water pipes of slacks,
blood ketchup on a pillowcase
of wrinkled health,
this stump among these
stately trees, should be
the grandest part of me.

Its boxing glove, in rings
of sweet mortality
fighting for the simple stand
as robbers holding up a bank,
lies coveted in canvas clothes,
silk negligees in upper drawers
of other women's diaries.
I stir the soup of self with tongue.
Seconds tick, the cool is slow.
Cognizant of burn and broth.
You talk me out of shame with touch.
Each raw caress, a peeled carrot,
orange color coming forth.
Its sting a bee that's lived its life,
decaying on the window sill.

Belladonna Bugle Calls

***Beauty is the still birth of suffering, every woman knows that.

Emily Prager (1987)

We fiddle, a chirpy little group of birds,
in the locker room beside the pool.
Fussing with canes and sticky clothes.
Swearing at the slippery floor
we know can deck us in an instant,
wounded pigeons looking
in the eagle's eyes.

Someone says: 'Doctors tell me
I'll never be free of ache and bruise."
Another quips:
"Have a little brandy swirl--
it dulls the damns,
stops the grass from mowing you.'
Impish laughter rattles walls.

All this flesh, a garden wallowing in toil.
Tender clipped by climate, season, turning hour.
We have earned our moles and scars,
rooted in the worst of life,
searching seraph, cherub bud.
Heaving breast, a belladonna bugle call,
beauty in its poisoned cup.

We haven't time to sit on thrones
where sadness reigns and winter coughs.
Too soon the Ace of death will win
and we will be those grains of sand
that wash across abandoned beach.
We will be that stringy beef
in freezers of a memory.

Laws of Time

Like every moth and every fly,
we're caught by laws of closet time.
Aging is a Jezebel to which
our bodies can't retort.
I rake my dreams into your lap,
sort the dust of flesh
from marrow, positive
of funerals and nothing else
when pain plugs in its power tools.
Even laughter seems like luggage
hard to lift when bones
don't do what they are told.
Every trip across the house
is longer than remembered strength.
By five o'clock, the clamp of ache
is all-consuming on its throne.

This is where the rule of love
wins checker games,
takes the blackest of the dark,
jumps the red of oozing blood.
Cobblehobble path of clay,
a statuette like autumn mulch
protecting sweet remains of spring.
I sprinkle gathered lambency,
think of how you a shape a stone
into a heart by guessing where a fall
will land, being there like summer grass.
My limbs leave sloppy signatures
on carpets with their fleas and dirt.
Your kiss gives cause to effort's fire.
Even when my skin is bibles,
parchment wrinkled, wrathful
at the climate's hour--
I decompose; you bring me back.
Slap the faces of the Fates;
I will know an opal lives
inside the pill of souring.

by Janet I. Buck

Lessons of a Stormy Lake

Too long defined by
plastic yardstick Barbie limbs,
there enters time where having grass
to hop across is scent
of minty evergreen.
You look at me beside the pool,
lifting bones like candlesticks that live
aware the melt holds heavy ordinance.

I fear the smack of pity's paddle,
turn my head and keep my eye
on motion's fragile obelisk.
Wondering turns you inside out--
you think you'd never have the strength
to crawl or crutch from bed at night
to empty bladders of the dark,
a fate without the leash of justice
guiding compensation's flame.

I look around and see a meal
of normalcy with knowledge
that its tire is just an ornament
on rented frame. Think of aging
dead ahead, aware that
flesh is overlay for solid gold
that builds upon inherent strength.

I hear a voice, the bandwidth
of a tragedy caught between
my ivory teeth and tossed across
a stormy lake, a bird that knows
the rails of cage before
his flight has carats
of the coming dawn.

by Janet I. Buck

The Memo Pad

Driven by the facial mask
of autumn's mulch across
the earth, chill that's
barely present now,
summer's layer almost gone.
Crackled brown geraniums
I snap and push back under eves
to arm their stalks against first frost.

I think of Christmas,
what to buy to match
the way you look at me.
Come up thinking stolen kiss.
Nothing in a store compares.
I pray our love will never be
that opal in some jewelry box
that stows itself away
from sun and bright potentiality.

by Janet I. Buck

Vice on Bone

You float in the syrup of sloe gin,
but the fizz dies.
Flesh becomes just pastry rolled
so thin it tears on blade of time.
Crimping hope with fingertips,
I struggle to bring you back and can't.
Add more ice cubes to your wine,
dry the base of sweaty goblet
just as if it holds my tears.
Money fills gaps but the canyon is large.
Five mink coats in cedar closets minus bugs
won't keep you warm when frost descends.
Bonsai of a ghostly forest
eats the wood with craving moss.
Memory loss excused away by
"just old age," as Father says.
Knowing of the deeper cause
in plastic bottles by your bed.

You can be that centipede
which grows new meat, but not alone.
Gunny sacks beneath dull eyes
search the room for fasteners
and picture hooks of past with nails.
Depression's mausoleum closing in
like edges of a vice on bone.
Pricey art is nicely framed.
That fiery voice I used to know
and sometimes hate when arrows
aimed their points at me--
is now a broken paper clip,
confetti of a frozen star.

by Janet I. Buck

Never Lonesome Tumbleweeds

Cheeks slapped raw by men before.
Shackles of their need in place.
Beneath bright gold of promise fire
lay ordinary firewood.
Napkin rings around
the linen of my flesh.
Ironed to steam of expectation
ruling how the curves would fall.

Why is "us" so different?
The way we sleep--a softer flame--
a trinity of arms and legs
in braided swans of coddled silk.
It's the trust factor figuring
into ipso facto artistry.
Famine penciled out for once,
but hunger as accompaniment.
Every night a page to write.
You enter stanzas of my thighs,
find sopranos singing there.

Earned dessert behind
the poison of our pasts.
Undoing paths of scorpions,
deep sea dives in fairy tales
without a tank of oxygen.
Every night is middle 'C'.
Your hands work breasts
like kneaded dough.
I brown in ovens of your kiss.
A brush of sand between all toes,
never lonesome tumbleweeds.

by Janet I. Buck

Dessert

For a long time,
I was a cranky country tune
wishing to wiggle its hips to love.
The last sad song on scratched CDs.
Desert owned dessert of hope
and not the other way around.
Emotion was a tumbleweed.
Pubic hair was graying wire.
Fences made of Brillo brine.
Stage of flesh was closed to touch,
an apathetic audience.
Time and treatment earned me that.
When it came to men before,
firewood stacked in hearth and home--
wet matches or a flat soufflé.

Dessert replaces desert storms.
Sleeping under stars for real.
Your fingers tune piano strings;
moonlight is a microphone.
You fiddle me; I rise to you
the way a lemon trusts the squeeze.
You are the rose all hearts deserve
on sunny morning breakfast trays.
Porch swing sway and pillow talk
make masters of our instruments.
All the drying reeds of past
seem cattails in a shrinking ditch.
My breasts are bumps
of Braille to read.
Practice on my body, please.

by Janet I. Buck

Untitled

An untitled child
wandered the ship.
He had a name and a great deal
of need, but stood ignored--
a candle burning in a bathroom
for scent--door closed,
his lavender forgotten like lost springs.
He jetted from place to place;
emotion was a vapor trail
disappearing in a hungry sea.
As every child-less woman must,
I wanted to take him home,
suckle his head against my breast,
comb out tangles in wispy hair.

Instead, I asked him his name--
bounced ping-pong balls
around the deck like syllables
flat in the humid clouds.
His parents turned their fingers
away from their drinks, occasionally,
to meet obligation, check him off,
an item on a grocery list.
He was there. I could have
told them that much from by-lines
of raw energy, from watching him
graze on a steward’s pat,
from gazing at ports and creeds
and seed pearls of his aching eyes.

by Janet I. Buck

***For Taylor

When You Yawn

I can read poetry
from from a text book
in class all day long
without the slightest fumble
or chalk-voice choke.
I can take Plath’s
Nazi lampshades
and twist their cores
like wash cloths
crying to be released.
I can put you square
in the center of her
awful oven and turn
up the heat until you
feel the gist of her grave.

Ask me to utter my own
and I am silence
in stained underpants
standing (quaking)
at the feet of some curse.
I feel my extremities--
palsied bricks on a mission
to discover their clay.
Sensing, but not trusting
their wetness--
first time sex on a closet floor.

The inside-out completion
of an artist walking
around his knives.
White cane hope--
touching their points,
skimming their blades.
When you yawn in the middle
of a reading, you are
crapping on versions
of nakedness--timid
and sacred--stepping
on hems of a Sunday mass.

by Janet I. Buck

Dirty Moons: Yugoslavia (1941)

It was a clean moon
above their heads--
an opal’s sparkle in even light.
Layers of food were plentiful;
bricks were part of churches still;
curses had not raped the scene.
Their vineyards basked in
pillow cases of a cloud,
thirsty for deserved rain.
Children dressed in plaids for school--
bright pennies in a loafer’s bed.
Immersion foot of world wars
was set aside for history books.

Tanks arrived in thunderbolts.
Sky changed clothes and buttons fell.
Grape juice took on bloody hues.
Trees were bitten hard in half
like carrots in a rabbit’s mouth.
One culture’s tracheotomy
with humans gasping exit air.
A window closed on shaking fists,
evacuation’s emigration took its toll.
Erasers falling off old pencils--
arbitration (sun-glass shades)
had filtered out a dirty moon--
guns were filthy silverware
cutting crusts off burning toast.

by Janet I. Buck

A Sudden Stroke

Sixty years of motion’s
rolling grocery cart; suddenly
your rickshaw switched to nurse’s aides.
The hospital bed in centers
of your living room:
all that trivial decor;
cocktail party toothpicks snapped;
photos of young insulin
in scrapbooks for eternity.
When help arrives, your tongue
won’t move to say "Hello" or ask for ice.
You talk by flipping one limp hand,
pointing a laser at alphabet blocks--
spelling out the things
you took for granted some
as bamboo shoots of trees do wind
or seasons bringing precious rain.

Every hug you didn’t give or didn’t get
seems Siamese twins of guilt and loss.
Poker tricks of youth are gone;
bills drop firm reminders here
like pigeons on cathedral domes.
Food goes in by way of tubes;
your husband stays for all of it.
Slimy watercress of tears
seem way past due deliveries.
He sees his role as tempering
the acid flavor of distress.
Bathes you with a plastic bucket,
lifting breasts like pomegranates
from your ribs and life grows
thin with you inside.

by Janet I. Buck

Mints on Muddy Pillow Shams

Diogenes in a hot tub of curdled dreams,
I tinker with emotion's safe.
Nylon stockings of a lyric
hide my flesh but call it up.
Judgment dandruff mixed with snow.
The apple rots from inside out.
For many years my only salve--
a shot glass with its line respected.
God, I held that ether well
like chlorine poured in swimming pools.
Something snapped. Sheets went stale.
Sad passed out, got stinkin' drunk.
I was robbing myself without regret
or knowing how much cache was gone.
I'll tell the plain brown-wrapper truth:
train wrecks on the rails of wine
took semi-trucks and made them small
like Matchbox Cars in Christmas socks.

Pillbox words in stanza wallets
take the heat I used to drink.
Ghosts and cobwebs suck their breath
from cloisters of my whittled bones.
Belittled, befuddled, be agony's fire.
For nearly twenty winter years,
mints upon my pillowcase
were bottles emptied for escape.
I know I should have prayed instead,
but God would surely understand
how pain can rape a midnight mass.
The pillar monk of crippled tides
was sadly sealed off from wise.
Crusoe on the cross of pain,
I wonder wander courage caves.
Sing Sing out of key but there.
Shame sham concentration leads.
Sober's closet sees the dark for what it is
and somehow corners breaking light.
Liquor's penitentiary was holding cells
for "do not touch me with the night."

by Janet I. Buck

Accent Graves

The troops in photo shoots
of our fifth grade history book
had medals on their jacket breasts--
not malignant warts of war.
Young men were herded
flocks of sheep
for cataclysmic gatherings.
Helicopter blades were clean--
brand-new shoehorns in a drawer.
Didn't wear, bear human blood.
Abscess hubris grew a head
like hatchets in a chicken yard.

Admiration's admirals
dressed up death in mink-coat cause.
We bought their tomes
of pride and courage--
missed the weight of tombstone gray.
Chauvinistic flares and sequins--
Lipizzaner moves and grace.
The sniper here was seaweed myth
with rifles tucked behind the scenes.
Badges stung like jellyfish
with swollen flesh of borrowed rage.

Our teacher advertised the bold
of standing up for freedom's flag.
Bunkers lined in righteous mud.
Lecture notes were missing truth
of lifeless slumps and lumps of
clots in patriotic casseroles.
Letters filled with spanking shock
were ice-cubes in our homemade stew.
The meat was born of body bags
that someone mailed to someone's mom.
Barnacles of battle boots
that came home empty oyster shells.
Draped in dandruff of a reason
soldiers never wrote themselves.

by Janet I. Buck

The Lonely Globe

You spin the globe of loneliness,
but cannot pierce its glassy frame.
Every weeping river rages--
makes your grieving fingers stick.
Booze brooms sweep the surface dust,
but do not touch dry dying's mud.
At sixteen years, I still see apples
on the tree--unbruised by aging ageless storms.
My day is made of tennis courts,
riding bikes, and "class dismissed!"
Suffer's not yet sharpened thorns,
except for stacks of surgeries.
Like Ping-Pong balls I flatten some,
but always seem to cross the net.
Fear is not a greyhound muzzled,
pinned in pens of starting gates.
There's water in the well out back.
I don't prefer a nap to life--
or feel the crust of crisis creme.

Your wife is rotting on the shelf
of cancer with its cupboards shut.
Her ovaries have turned to prunes--
knives must stomp and quick remove.
She locks away her cramps in piles--
sweaty socks for maids to wash.
You pace the den like mother bears--
anticipating preying wolves.
When living chokes and spits her out,
the oriental chill is there,
without the resignation part.
Black marble of the bathroom tile--
Satan's snakes one-upping smiles.
Death, a lump upon a globe;
art is architecture's ache;
mortal dares not read its map;
Sober is a Magic Marker
underlining hollow caves.

by Janet I. Buck

Scraped Coal

She was one of those gifts
who turned wisdom
into a batch of butterflies.
Treated a puppy whining
at the door as the
Queen of England.
Made lessons fit in
pretty little pill box stanzas
that rendered
a point digestible,
but still a point.
Her mouth was
a moving quill
that trembled in
emotion's arms,
a drug-bust for honest,
a slip-stitch
for stray threads.
She scraped coal
off burned toast
with a remarkable lack
of condescension
lyrics cannot imitate--
but if they don't try,
so much will be lost.

by Janet I. Buck

Just-ice

We all grew up on G.I. Joe.
Gospel hope was underlined
by uniforms in willing green.
Touching down from Vietnam--
a sandblast same as battle zones
with air-sick bags across your lap.
So young to weather scraps of men
in piles of doom like
stir-fry scooped on beds of rice.
Huts and homesteads bombed and flicked--
just ashes from a cigarette.
Courage was the currency.
We stuffed your pockets with our need--
ordered death like mincemeat pie.

The judgment tomes that hit the air
were wet grenades and pressure valves
on pots of stew you didn't cook.
Because you went, you wore blame
on covers of a magazine,
gave your Purple Heart away,
shredded Newsweek in your head.
Our patriotic tetanus shots
belonged in slabs of open wounds
of men like you who signed their names
on corners of a chopping block.

Felt the sweat of protest's heat
in socks that should have been
safe harbors of a baseball glove.
Army boots like penny jars
that held the toes of misspent youth.
The hooting owl freedom calls--
a beeper in a doctor's car.
War limps madly among the weeds
and cattails of a muzzled gun:
like marble for the just-ice cause
of something we treasure
but cannot spell and always lose--
guppies in the mouths of whales--
of raw and ripping rifle fire.

by Janet I. Buck

The Snail’s Trail

The titular head of will is moot.
Its fabric copes but cannot change
frayed threads and puffs in quilted fate.
Amputation’s spider webs
are simply part of who I am.
The ruler of "don’t stretch this way...
don’t step on that..." you
beat my knuckles scarlet raw.
Time is my tarantula.
Agony--a Grecian urn
that sprinkles salt in powdered sugar.
Lust for "move" in livid {CAPS}
for simple reasons of denied.

I should pray, I suppose,
for strength to swallow suffer’s sand,
but try instead to sweep slime tears,
scrape their algae rings away,
cover up this snail’s trail.
Old age steals birth, grows weeds
of weak agnostic bitters.
A cue stick screaming "limits! limits!"
smacking balls on tables tilted.
Struggle’s points are adding up.
Pain pills stop for stranded cars--
jack the tires pierced and worn.

A hard-on for mobile unrivaled by
Adonis shadows framing
a bed on wedding nights.
I hear your chimes on patios.
I watch your legs address your slacks.
If I tell you shades of envy green,
you’ll catch the stench of weakness here.
Your limbs are such a masterpiece:
I see what faith is like erect.
Imagine how it feels to love
a pair of limbs so tenderly you want
to keep them smoothly shaved.

by Janet I. Buck

Momentary Mistletoe

Your life erased before my birth.
I knew nothing beyond
your photographic charm
in tinted sepia that
lit her study’s roaring fire.
But you were put on pedestals--
the knight in shining armor’s tails
on carousels she couldn’t stop.
Florence said you carried
warnings to your grave.
Worked your fingers ‘til they bled,
only to retire in talons of death
at the magic age of 55.

You had your shelters stocked with cash,
your travel plans, priorities.
Bought a Mexican villa with lovely gardens--
those walls were dreams you’d never see--
but ones that she would always grieve.
She said, you said: "Human is a ferryboat
that pushes through deceiving fog,
only to reach a rocking pier or
lose the fight to find the shore."
When you left, her heart dissolved,
but pilgrims rarely quit the quest.
Her diary--collected sorrow put to use--
became a harbor for my tears like
winter barns with nests of straw
and Bandaids for my absent knee.

What a stunning ballerina--
making morals, money too--
a music box to wind and play.
"Kiss a moment’s mistletoe
as if it is your very last..."
The canyon of our mortal pose
is such a hollow place at times.
She never let an aching heart
roll desert dust with tumbleweeds.
I asked her why she never dated.
This was her red brick defense:
"Paradise that’s genuine cannot be matched
by mediocre efforts etched in mourning sand
around perfection’s Parthenon.
It’s trading passion’s Staffordshire
for Matchbox Cars in Christmas socks.
It’s filling in a sonnet’s lines
with nothing but ellipsis marks."

by Janet I. Buck

Depression’s Michelangelo

Depression’s Michelangelo,
like city smog, was hanging
on our bedroom wall.
Hope was crumbs
from stale croissants.
The covers pulled
in circus drapes.
You sitting on a job-less fence.
A finch in jaws of wired weak--
frozen to the damaged core--
an ice-cube stuck to fingertips.

The lynx of wallow in the mud
became your eyes--hence our skies,
our consonance and assonance--
the flavor of commitment’s air.
Slam fingers in emotion’s
door repeatedly--
we would leave despair’s
well-guarded loins alone.
Snow-pea smiles,
a working wife, two little girls.
You jerked our strings
too many times and all
the green was gone inside.

We three moths who
waited on your moods a lot
jumped ferryboats in search of light
like refugees or ants
that climb a swinging branch
in search of scraps of sugared dregs.
Our scrapbook staring
back at us: panthers kicking
kitty litter on the rug
‘til all the rocks had disappeared--
a trinity of disappointed
sap-starved flapping hummingbirds.

by Janet I. Buck

The Unfortunate Fax

Print me out and listen up.
I am the echoes
of all you own
in terms of easy motion’s gift.
Your tune determined
by my hollow,
sonorous as jetting wasps.
The fatuous posture
of envy’s teat,
a leech I live with every day.
I rock its horse,
slap will’s behind,
stumble over every vault.

Your leotards and pantyhose
are ribbons on a Christmas gift.
If you haven’t guessed by now,
legs were on my wishing list,
but Santa skipped this chimney flue.
I live and breathe the stray coal
lust for lustrous motion,
gracefulness like butterflies
with satin wings I see
but do get to keep.

My breasts are big
from what I’m told,
but all I spy in bathroom mirrors
are harbors of their useless caves.
If I could walk on my nipples,
I would (but I can’t).
Hope flattens out like
semen spent and the
flaccid peace of gratefulness--
my ether comes from moving pens
and white dust codeine’s
shamed relief.

by Janet I. Buck

The Elevator Shaft

Idiotic moi.
I taught a course on Women’s Lib,
but clearly didn’t learn a thing.
The second you lost your job,
I emptied out my second closet,
sold furniture you didn’t like,
took pictures off the sanguine walls,
let you move your issues in.
Desperation’s penthouse full,
a long, long fall from sixteen floors.
Your need became my bedroom slippers,
almost toast too warm to leave.
I sat with you on balconies,
sipped on crisis gimlets poured,
despite the fact I hated gin.

The elevator to the top
was really heading very down.
Co-dependence ironed shirts.
Lights of wise and logic failed.
I was stuck like bolts on screws,
bound by rusted promises
and never knowing where to turn.
The drowning bell of calling out.
Our contents page was crying wolf.
You moaned, I came.
You screamed, I left.
You slapped. I wrote.
You walked black alleys of despair.
I would wash affected clothes.
Two lions in a litter box--
the gravel spray your brutal tongue.

Denial’s caps, evasion’s lid
we both snapped crazy, crazy shut.
The grassroots of our vows had died;
so little left to talk about
but road maps of an exit plan.
I pulled the cord of needing you;
reciprocal was never born.
You lectured on your chimeras
until I had them memorized.
Depression was a corporation:
you had almost all its stock.
Discovering what aphids
do to rosy cheeks;
how they tie a rising sun
behind our backs with selfish guns.
Married to a brutal blizzard--
even in the month of June.

by Janet I. Buck

The Object Lesson

Summer spanked.
Reminding me
of times I didn't stop
to kiss the parted lips
of morning dew.
Steaming in the shade-less
grip of August suns,
I bolted like a wounded horse
to last gasp answers of the pool.

A palsied man on crosses twixt
a chair and gurney slapped
the ass of senseless whining.
Arms and legs were stunted sprouts
from old potatoes in a bin.
Head was ticking same as clocks.
Moved in such eternal cramps.
Tongue flapped sideways,
hanging out like soggy meat
that's falling through a paper bag.

His pain a catheter in place
to realizing inner-tubes.
I who griped of flattened tires,
aches attached to grocery shopping,
liners for my plastic limb like
condoms oversized exploding--
monsoon moaning at its finest--
met the object lesson's fire.

The Pipe of Grief

Christmas morning's muddy snow
in stockings that I couldn't hang.
The day you died was ultra-violet
desperation coming back to visit me.
I balanced on the raft awhile,
licked the sucker isolation,
lost an oar and guzzled wine.
It was all I had for Kleenex.
Hadn't quite expected torrents,
poisoned joy so thirsty, dry that
matches would have been an angel.
All the glitter on the tree was
brighter than my eyes could handle.
Holidays were felonies without
your hands to pat them down.

Tinsel on the pining fur
was sagging as I spoke of you.
The ornaments you made yourself
were almost falling from the tree.
Aiming fire at God, at fate,
I ran the gamut cleaning house.
Pressed your Irish linen twice.
Waited for the whispered steam
to tell me I had I missed a spot
or folded napkins inside out.
Ninety years, you'd had enough
of motion's meager brittle wreath.
Infernos on the stage of death
are hunchbacks with a harpsichord.
Wrenches of a rolling stanza
couldn't fix the pipe of grief.

Shoveled Sand

Idiotic wandering this wondering
exactly smacking guessing wistful
how a Christmas stocking feels
that has a real leg inside.
Drop-kick envy's marbles rolling
under dressers, in the closet,
mowing down the brittle grass
to make a cave of hay and pride.
I spend a stanza pulling strings
from rubber, stale celery stalks.
Stand my dolls on kitchen counters,
just pretending we can waltz.
They have perfect knees, of course,
like new erasers on a pencil.
Haven't born the tumbleweeds
and bristles of intruding knives.

Behind the curtain, rolling gurneys.
Hips are wired and screaming shock.
I have worn the mask of "fine"
so long I think I almost trap
the alligators suiting up
in mossy swamps of anger's bile.
At night with you, I'm never naked.
Still I'm barer in our bed
than I have been with any man.
Something in the arch of faith
has lined the bow of honest clamps.
Something in the bunk of loving,
well, has bombed the Klu Klux Klan.
It rides at night when I'm asleep.
Has to do with wraps of you.
Curved in spoons instead of claws.
The missing slipper matters less.
Touch-me-nots of isolation
move in waves like shoveled sand.

Nuance Green

The corduroy of cyber-space
was overalls I think we needed.
Distance nets with safety strings
in bellies of a trampoline.
Lust we knew was sliding saddles.
Bird seed from a wistful feeder
scattered like piano dust.
The pedal of romance had stuck
in early morning risky wrongs,
and we had rushed our souls before
as poodles gnawing at a bone.

Here we spun the clay of dreams
like tubes of blood you centrifuge.
The red cell blushing fleshy part
was balanced with the white of thought.
Back and forth across the wires
connecting + and = signs.
The face-to-face was perfect frosting
on the spoon of soldered hearts.
I would learn the jade of cherish
several shades of nuance green.
Knew from you that other men
were nothing but pedestrians
among the wings of soaring eagles.
Rip Van Winkle waking up
and seeing what it is to love.
Catastrophic Bones & All
The firm massage from far away.
She would gaze in looking glasses.
Seeing sagebrush in the sand.
The tumbleweeds in whispers danced.
Her walking stick in chalking white,
the feathered wisdom of her bones.
She fiddled some with moving stanzas
through the torrents of the clouds.
Syllabic flames. Convenient fires.
For burning up the checkered flag
of satin normal really shines
but gray and cripple plagiarize.
The elk of courage mounted well
upon the page like slides beneath
a microscope. She wanted knowing
when she died, they’d find a mantel
in her head that said and very loudly too:
"She had barroom brawls with fate;
catastrophic bones and all;
shingles dropping from a roof;
through it all she wore a smile
like cactus flowers on desert floors.
He saw such a different pose.
The dulcet frame of pride within
that slit her wrists like razor blades.
And well, they both were wondering
where caches of the tears were stored.
They buried her in heavy clothes.
And yes she wore her wooden leg.
They were joined like siamese twins.
It wasn’t very comfortable,
but there were eyes to weather here
and they would always matter more.

Artichoking Leaves

Admitting this disgusting tale.
In tune, so very much the same
as Ada’s strife in movie-magic,
Eros deep of the Piano* and its keys.
One hand on the chopping block.
The other on my twisted thigh.
For better, worse, or both perhaps:
"We did what seemed was best for you."
What was left of riven limbs
became an artichoking leaf.
A stranger in a foreign land
among the necks of daffodils.
The looking glass, a goblet
with a broken stem.
My stump a steaming submarine
like Ada’s finger once removed.
Its fabric was the cast of hope
they left alone upon the shore.
Very purple body wash
of courage under heavy fire.
The page will scream what I cannot.
This acid, utter naked part.
The film was staged. My life is real.
Admitting this disgusting tale,
I’m doing through the intercom
of very, very needy art.

*the Piano, starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, and Sam Neill, was written and directed by Jane Campion and released in 1992.

Brillo Pads & Body Casts

Ironically it’s what was missing
from the waste of paste of
Fate mistaking pride and other
power tools for ultra-violet
fortitude regarding all the
bump and grind of bones
that grew in some spots
not in all of them like
grass forgotten by a hose.
This is what was body-casting.
Mattresses were Brillo Pads.
The plate of femininity defined
by misdemeanors, guarded tears,
that never could decide if
it was really safe to fall.
Cops of eyes would pull her over.
Then begin the cruel frisking.
Whisking all the eggs of mind
and dumping them in burning skillets.
He was hot pads by the stove.
Made her feel as though her bones
were not just dented cans to place
behind the rows of perfect ones.
Dichotomies of absent parts
are not the substance of the dawn.
The traffic court of weighing in.
Candor’s gavel on her thumbs.
The aftertaste of eyes is hard.
Taking off the scabs of heart
was learning lush is in the head.
That in the game of growing faith,
a pair of satin, satin thighs
is not the only, only card.

Bonsai

Her stump, a leg, its pages torn
from bibles made of accidents
and other cruel curves of fate.
Yet so mortal it its stance.
Black, black elegance of sorts.
The dark is made of operas
and over-coming storms of lies.
Much the same as otters
sliding on the rocks.
The ocean is so dangerous
and still they call it home.
A desert but for flowing tears.
Until it finds a place to rest in folds
of someone’s open heart.
Fragile driftwood bending in
to reach the sky.
I guess it’s just emotion’s art.
The ways of finding cups
of sand to anchor it.
Keep it from exploding bombs
I hate to say, I have to say,
a simple pair of eyes.

Cursing Wheels

These are stanzas that I swore
I’d never, ever write.
Lizards meeting scorpions.
The svelte repose of how
you waltz so casually.
Secret worship of your legs
that hurry ‘cause you tell them to.
Playing footsie under tables.
Ripe, delicious sex appeal.
Apple knees without a bruise.
Ballet slippers by the bed.
Negligees are leotards.
I cannot bear, I cannot bare,
I cannot bear to try them on.
Metal joints. Their cursing,
creaking, cranking wheels
like static on a microphone.
Desperation’s photos under
magnets clinging to the fridge.
Pity’s hands are wandering.
I’m picking at the plate of why?
Rhyming, timing, climbing smiles.
Their chivalry is fading faster
than your eyes like handcuffs
wrapped around my wrists.
The wheelchair. An albatross
I’ve cut and pasted in my head.
Wilted motion’s watercress.
It turns a shade of envy green.
Reciting pride like nursery rhymes
that make the story sting, I hope,
a little, little less.

by Janet L.Buck

The Empty Church

Two lenses watch my meager life:
the selfish bruise of family
and the compass rose of precious friends.
My sister’s living room is neat--
Mother’s light peach carpet soul is pale.
Both are born of frigid snow
without a place for muddy cleats.
I ask (a quiet beg, I suppose)
for their presence and aid
in respect to raping knives
and helplessness: a "hair appointment,"
laundry lists of things to do, are
writ in stone, slapping and stinging
the burning cheek of suffer’s fire.
Dismissal pours from bottles
and pills, but sadly doesn’t end
in that excuse. My father too,
a blood stain on this paltry globe;
I recognize, despise, dispose,
the map before my steaming eyes.
Their homes come with parties
and minks in every shade
and marble warped by touch me not.
Roses will sleep unseen,
refrigerated in a flower shop,
because money has
more important things to do.
An art museum in trapping’s sense,
where "class" learns to whisper
what it owns but live on less.
Zucchini anger is larger, I know,
than forgiving soil should tolerate.
Plastic pink flamingo morals
are hideous growths on callous toes;
Palm Springs facts write petty books.
My friends have thin wallets
and canyon hearts with steady streams.
What little they own they pass around
like candles when the lights go out.
Understanding’s shower stall--
we stand together naked there.
They know the pound
of torture’s rain because they
reach and let it in.
Send carnations and get well urges
so strong they do, in a way,
move mountains of wronged.
I have learned from both roads,
though one is a path--the other a ditch:
a bank is just an empty church.
Tinker Toy "have" builds little but mad.
Clemency is a lace towel
in a fancy bathroom no one ever pisses in.
They will die surrounded by dollar signs,
but penniless in matter cliques.
Stained-glass sorrow can’t survive
the gritty teeth of money’s vice.
When their bodies are old jails,
my parents will not, I pray,
be picking out of their cells alone.
But if justice climates show themselves,
their cots will be wet and
unmade tombs shall rot ignored.

by Janet I. Buck

Goose Feathers

I pulse with tendons torn
and muscles slaughtered
by knives, but I can afford
to pay you for your help,
so we talk about life between
agony’s seams and laugh
at anal things like crooked cushions--
aware they are stand-up comics
for the helpless show of bigger issues
"try" won’t budge.
Hungry, for me, is tied to health;
for you it’s bill collectors
on a gluttonous mission
to suck up what little
you gather each day.
We argue with smiles.
You say I’m paying you too much,
more than we agreed;
and I retort with "not enough."
I know this little bit of cash--
soapy bubbles in thick, thick mud--
might clear way for hope balloons,
buying just one Christmas toy,
even though the rubber’s thin.
Tired from three jobs,
raising your kids, going to school.
Still springing like a deer
through a forest of wolves.
Scarlet sorrow in brown sacks
beneath Adonis eyes with
a silent and steady drip
for all the torture that you stroke.
Swan-soft hands on lily pads--
a healthy hubris born
of just no other choice.
Money voids are deeper,
always, than penniless dread.
The ice-cold callous
of my family freezes us both:
we own too much and have too little.
You kiss blessings of the opposite,
though its answer seems mute
when bills gather steam
in cauldrons of worried nights.
For a holiday bonus, I shall
hand you a wad of green paper
as quietly as I can--
like goose feathers that we
both know will never add up
to the pillow you need.
You will make soup
and brush my puppy,
bring me coffee, wipe up
thick frustration’s dust.
My human hole is amputation
and surgeries braided as thick,
thick ropes through trying times.
The latest always seems the worst.
I swallow sheer will like a raw egg
and cough it up in the lap of pain.
Its yolk is there, but dry and flaked.
Two worlds: one sense.
We both have struggle’s
carrots to peel and spike.
The gift, I guess, is they blend
with hearts that wear
the burn of salt and lime,
but link like arms
through quicksand mires.
At 30+ and 43, older stems
from sandpaper wise.

by Janet I. Buck

Crazy Callous

I live with a wonderful man
and two pretty sick double-entendres:
the invalid of invalid
and the vice vice
of my family’s money tree.
Their tails are trapped
by too much easy.
Peacock feathers fanning cash.
Blizzard-cold insensitive
can’t quite fathom
scented candles of compassion
must be lit to kick the melt.
They do not know the soggy real
of bones that fall through paper bags
or rosaries that snap their strings.
The fragrance of chasing
a Mercedes Benz and cruise-ship lace
makes my simple life of "write with heart"
just birdseed on the patio.
I hope to God I’d never stoop
to wishing they wore wounded wings.
Like homeless men beside the road,
my need just rolls their windows up.
Sharing this should roll them down,
but saddle-sacks of thoughtfulness
beneath my eyes they’ll never read.
Crazy callous--having makes.
Suffer’s clearly changed my oil.
They’d bring business cards
to a funeral mass if they thought
it would move them up a rung.
The dirge inside me--broken glass--
admitting this a snow-stained blast.
I hope I’ll use the compass rose
of thorns they wear and ones you lack
to teeter-totter toward the peace.
I hope I’ll flip forgiving pancakes
long before the batter burns.

by Janet I. Buck

The Disappointed Parachute

You dance on paths
of easy street and can’t
admit there is a ditch.
My morning struggle ritual,
a language egg you cannot crack.
How does one sit up,
plant feet, just stand and walk?
A miracle I’ll never know
but always save in jaded form.
I have, in its place,
the fundamentals of grateful
for baby seeds of smaller things:
the bend of a wrist;
the flap of a laugh;
fingers playing word keys
like piano notes or
itches scratched.
What I convinced myself
for forty years was
a parachute of inner strong--
is, in fact, exploded condoms
for sticks of feel you
simply can’t get up at all.
When the swab of know
has touched a nerve,
then talk to me.
This glaze of petty
on our lives depresses
me to Hell. I’m tired.
And love is going back to bed.

by Janet I. Buck

The Pathology Report

You line up the world
from purely scientific
points of view.
Dead people look calm,
something I’m not--
in the rusty vice of agony.
Your living made on wings
of "after suffer," not the
cruel act itself.
Pat-downs of
these private snakes
will always slither in the dark.
When hurt knocks hard
and rings the bell,
you just can’t let the sorrow in.
Pain’s infected cloud is a cell
on a slide: a membrane,
not memory, to slice and read;
its sticky cherish stands between.
Polite dismissal
is a queasy version
of lazy missiles,
with missions aborted
when it comes to feel.
You piss behind
the shrub of cash;
but money isn’t answers now.
I pray you learn
that other levers
of a heart engaged in love
will see a stranded motorist
beside the cold abandoned road
and use your wit--
not your wallet--
just to jack his wheel up.

by Janet I. Buck

The State Vegetable

I’m a State vegetable--not a flower
or a shrub or a tourist’s map.
I belong to the ward of inhumanity
with such a stench
that my nostrils explode.
I owned a laundromat,
ran the business expertly,
raised my children, exercised,
had a life, and lived my faith.
A friend of mine (she worked for me)
had "man trouble," so I went home
with her to pack her bags.
Her husband, on an Amadeus rage,
burst in: he killed his wife
and shot me five times.
I have no money,
no motion, no working lungs.
I am a ward of the State;
doctors refuse to let me die.
My only fairy tales
are hard, hard drugs
and marijuana slipped in
behind the doctors’ backs.
I can see. I can hear.
I can feel the obelisk of agony
in every fiber of my soul.
The man who shot me
hanged himself before the trial.
He, not I, had the luxury of release.
My body, which used to be
fit and trim, is now a huge pile
of vile green mashed potatoes
and the bedsores exude
a hideous odor that turns
the nurses’ stomachs inside out.
You refuse to pull the plug
and I suffer things you would never,
on your life, allow a wounded dog.
I welcome the panther of death
with open arms;
it is you who are afraid.
The chalice of mercy lies in your hands
and you refuse to fill it up.
This is the piss of missing courage:
yours, not mine, for if I had my way
I’d decide in an instant and be done.
Your medicine designed to help
is nothing but and nothing more
than oatmeal puke of gutless scum.

by Janet I. Buck for Julie

The Newer Poetry of Janet I. Buck

Reviewed by Jim Strope

Apart from being the most productive poet we know, Janet I. Buck exhibits high qualities of verse that is apparent on several levels. Her phrases and lines are packed economically with image and emotion. Her sentences orchestrate the phrase into a music, and her stanzas and whole poems depend on an ironic theme.

Her verse is romantic, in that the voice is apart from that which it covets. It longs for what could have been.

We focus on a very few of her very best.

In Rivers of Distinguishing, she focuses on the concavities of life, foregrounding the missing and the missed.

There are streaks of coal gray
in ringlets of an aging wish.
Teeth flash cavities of void.
I wonder, should I pull decay or live
with nerves smitten by denial's freeze.
Err on rainbow sides of trust.
Put away the mockeries of black baboons
swinging from the Brillo trees
in jungles raining Chardonnay.
Embrace the state's geography
that comes with full reciprocals.
Shall I stay, embedded in our silences,
or go where conches hear me scream?

Here with you in basements
flooded by a keg, I hate myself
for reaching for that unmet kiss
which lingers on old longing's tongue.
I play with rocks too big to lift.
All our truths, a contact lens
lost but swimming all the same
in rivers of distinguishing.
I claw at blind disciple faith
same as cats attack a screen --
in hunger for plain nourishment.

On the road, my eyes approach
a messy sticker, edges torn:
"Live love before you're balding eagles
staring straight at flight's demise."
Conclusions rectify their paths;
deafness seems despicable.
I wash a set of dirty slippers
shuffling in heritage.
Fluff them dry to meet a dream.
Plunge myself in fragrances.
See this joy as sweaters
warming spine and flesh
my soul refuses to return.

Some of the metaphors are mysteriously mixed, such as rainbow sides of trust, and mockeries of black baboons swinging from the Brillo trees but, nevertheless, her poetic license is valid and the shattered images shine through, complementing the sense of the poem. 'Trusting a rainbow' suggests a fairy-tale romanticism and the 'baboons in Brillo trees' is a mad, domestic scene. The free-wheeling metaphoric style creates a jagged, crazy-quilted pastiche of the desired, reached for, and the morsel obtained. It's a reflection of the world in a broken mirror, a world of very little bought with so much.

Owning Bitter Silences is a remarkable tapestry of style and image. The first stanza is all anguish.

There comes a dragonish time
when truth must shed its crimson fire.
Take owning of Antigones,
break poor rules, wear its pulse
on tattered sleeves.
Stains and all, blood crust crying out
in red for lift above a cherub renaissance.
Its content fresh but dubious.
My nerves claw at the screen.
I whine into deaf ear.

You will stew here
in a valley of putting greens
manicured like pretty nails.
Surface chatter rattling its hailstones
on pool halls of silences.
In the thrashing of splitting corks,
bottle caps for Sunday bonnets,
Mother's migraines will be
waiting in the cold sheets.
Last night's wine, barking at brain's thick door.
A blanketing lie to keep you warm.

Meanwhile, I fuss with the cradle
of a soul speaking its first word.
Scribble myself like earth worms in spring dirt.
Move full amaryllis bulbs from closet dark,
spread their roots, replant a girth of joy
outside the corset of our ways.
You might wonder, you might not.
You might ask, but I won't hope
for questions to erupt and dance.
"Why leave this climate stocked
with festive scented pines?" And I will say:
"If clouds had valves, you'd shut them down."

The voice of the poem is bitter and critical, supplying plenty of evidence for its emotional state. Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, cared for him, mad, dethroned, and blind after his fall. This stanza is about change and chance, a dare stuck in your face, a perseverant attempt at leadership.

The second stanza displays the carpeted complacency with which we insulate ourselves from the terror of existence. Why be quiet about it?

The last stanza offers a partial solution coupled with the ironic expectation of deliberate ignorance. It appears to abandon hope but the action is defiant and, hopefully, influential.

Sine Qua Non is a wine-and-roses song, a remorseful complaint of what could have been. The indispensable drink has permanently displaced the beautiful. Its romantic lyricism is of surpassing beauty.

Liquor picks our pockets.
I cannot recall an evening's moon
without its Cyclops biting dream.
Check the ground like homeless men
sift through alleys of the grit
for scraps of copper suns intact,
some wealth that might be hiding there.
I blame the bottle for our flaws,
their bobbins knotted at specious hour
whenever a cork or can is close.
You drift in clouds of sine qua non.
Tables set with solid silver
free of tarnish spoon a lie.
We're trading tears for Chardonnay
that could be crystal waterfalls.

We've stoned our voices crying out.
A beer stands tall, foamed in facile Ivory Soap.
On shopping trips, I wander down
a grocery aisle with rusted wheels,
marbles of forgiving weak
on rosaries with brittle strings.
Just once I ask if we could go without a goblet
packed with rivers born of toxins
poisoning a moment's earth.
The question thins like vapor trails
above the runways of our choice.
Linguistics of denial reign.

My books are coasters for a glass.
Their cherub bindings never broken by your eyes.
Their cords detached from renaissance.
We've pickled those affluent dawns
that come with blizzards, thunderheads.
My soberness is just a prude
in prunes of livers locked into their own demise.
This loneliness, a damp receipt I toss aside,
wrinkle in a bitter fist.
And we address our saddle sores
by riding into nothingness.

The Woman Who Stuck Around is an ironic portrait of a woman who sacrifices herself in many small ways over a long time and is paid very little for the effort.

It's Christmas Eve;
you are driving the long length
of a state pummeled by
rain, darkness, and fear.
To visit your mother,
who's given up her reins on life.
When you pass remainders
of riven skunks on dangerous curves,
your headlights will reflect her waste.
Your husband's mom
is dying in the hospital.
You've bathed and dressed
her swelling tumors,
combed her hair as wealthy
women brush a mink.
Bonded in the round dance
of shared grief, cradled her bones
like piles of nails falling
through a wet brown bag.

Expecting nothing in return,
you will be known as
the woman who stuck around.
The woman who lived the boil
and nursed the burn,
who saddled a horse
and rode the wind,
clichés of angels,
proving that undaunted love
means walking barefoot
through thick mud.
Someday in a far off grave,
the toe tag on your body's frame
will say: "this woman stuck around,"
shoveled banks of sorrow's snow,
even when the tulips left,
courting every hairpin turn,
gravel in her open eyes.

In general, Janet's poetic observer assumes an air of superiority. Except for a failure to be effective in its criticism, nearly confessing an inability to change the nearest and dearest parts of the world, her voice is sinless. It observes the crime. But if one is to advise, one assumes common sense, if not an expertise, which makes sense.

Her observed characters careen about the landscape and collide violently with their loved ones in a social demolition derby before the eternal, cold, and starry night.

Her characters are utterly devoid of self-pity.

She maximizes the density of her lines by omission, which sometimes pushes a phrase into obscurity. But these instances are rare enough and they redeem themselves by tantalizing the reader with a meaning just out of reach of the explicit.

Her rhythm is consistently iambic with three or four feet to the line and a pleasure to read aloud. She makes generous use of alliteration such that each line is interesting in itself and often echoes a more distant statement, making the ironic argument deep and complex. In Marbles Rolling Toward the Light,

I'm dreaming of a moving van;
wheels are turning as I sleep.
Guilt soaks through my paper skin,
burns its paint like acetone.
I am moths that bat their wings
in closets of a cashmere life.

Tender Violence: the poetry of Janet I. Buck

a review by James Robert Strope

The critic’s job is to break the cool silence and to stimulate the discussion of art. San Francisco Salvo has been fortunate to receive three groups of verse from Janet I. Buck from Medford, Oregon. Her work exhibits a clear and consistent style of coupling a familiar and tender image with a violent or abrasive result.

Her four-beat lines are dense with meaning, packed with the strongest words, and she delivers surprise. The lines change direction abruptly, mid-phrase, jerking the reader around the sharp corners of the author’s experience while maintaining the larger direction of the poem, which is the tender and hard-bitten melancholy of the outsider.

Her word choice produces an emotional and intellectual exercise for the reader. She stretches the meaning of words almost to the breaking point but maintains the sense and so I am seldom lost and always interested.

The Pipe of Grief is a good example of her style. The poem focuses on loss and phrases such as "poisoned joy" and "Holidays are felonies" typify the sharp corners the agile reader must negotiate while reading Janet’s poetry. Catastrophic Bones & All is an excellent poem in this vein.

Momentary Mistletoe is my favorite and something of a departure in that it is more monolithic, less angular and abrasive. It contains some of her most exquisite lines, touching an aesthetic ideal, yet laced with mourning. With Depression’s Michelangelo, these two poems, which are newest to Salvo, could mark a new phase in Janet’s work.

The Empty Church is also monolithic but suffers from the uniformity. The brightest spots are the ironic couplings such as "My father too, a blood stain on this paltry globe" and "minks in every shade" highlight an otherwise constant and bitter diatribe.

Janet Buck has a strong emotional core that she uses to drive her poetry to completion and she has a deft grasp of the art. We look forward to more from her.

BIO

Janet Buck has a Ph.D. in English and teaches writing and literature at the
college level.

Her poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in A Writer’s
Choice, Born Magazine, Stirring, The Melic Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly,
Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Urban
Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, San Francisco Salvo, Apples & Oranges,
Ceteris Paribus, In Motion, Pogonip, Peshekee Review, Thunder Sandwich, The
Suisun Valley Review, The Red Booth Review, The Poetry Kit, Miserere,
Niederngasse, Lynx: Poetry from Bath, The Horsethief’s Journal, salon D’Art,
Pif, The Dragonfly Review, Morpo, Recursive Angel, Big Bridge, Eclectica,
Pith, La Petite Zine, EWG Presents, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In
1998, 1999, and 2000, she has won numerous creative writing awards and been a
featured poet for Seeker Magazine, Poetry Today Online, Vortex, Conspire,
Poetry Cafe, Dead Letters, the storyteller, Poetry Heaven, Athens City Times,
Poetic License, 3:00 AM e-zine, Poetry Super Highway, Carved in Sand,
PoetryMagazine.com, Beachfire Gathering, and Cafe Society. Two of Buck’s
poems have been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize in Poetry and she is
a recent recipient of The H.G. Wells Award for Literary Excellence.

In December 1999, Newton’s Baby Press released her first print collection of
poetry entitled Calamity’s Quilt: http://www.newtonsbaby.com/calamity.html
Janet is one of ten U.S. poets to be featured at the “One Heart, One World”
Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000.
Her poem “Acrylic Thighs” was translated into five languages and paired with
original artwork. The tour will travel to France, Australia, Vietnam,
Brazil, and Japan.

Janet’s first e-book of poetry, entitled Reefs We Live, is now available at
Word Wrangler Publishing: http://www.wordwrangler.com. In May 2000, Word
Wrangler released Buck’s first e-book of humor entitled Desideratum’s Doggie
Dish. It contains what critics have called a “biting, hilarious, and
original look at the roles of men and women, the foibles of bureaucracy, and
the hubris of academia.” To order a copy, go to:
http://www.wordwrangler.com/desideratum.html

To read more of Janet's work or schedule a reading, go to
http://www.janetbuck.com

Last Updated April 18, 2001
For more information contact:

Janet Buck