poetry by 

 

JANET BUCK

Grammy's Tools. Fickle Sand. Grandfather's Chair. Fond Pastiche  Innocence & Opera Love's Cervix  Pitch  Paint Me.  The Old Packard, Our West Side Story of Romance

 

Grammy's Tools

The clothesline, Grammy quipped,
is a tree house string with a can
where women gather to swirl
a rumor in lukewarm tea.
Watch your back! she warned.
The birds have ears.
They'll carry a secret around the block.
They learn to sing from listening.
Grampa grinned from old cocoons
of hammocks on the shaded porch.
Aware she was his brick and tree,
his every grain of reasoning.
Amazed at how tortilla flesh
stood up to welcome mats of graves.
Amazed at how she passed the sun
from fingertip to fingertip
as if it were a flaming torch.

Those full-lipped white magnolia smiles
wove lasting garlands in my hands.
She spoke directly to a rose
as if its infant needed her.
Flowers learned to kneel in moisture,
then revolt again toward light.
Epiphany was just a page
of cotton shirts, blood removed,
sleeves relaxed like bygone ghosts.
Her stomach wiggled when she laughed --
bowls of tested gelatin.
An apron for her negligée,
the teeth of a washboard for silk
and a good book of dreams
to balance a menu of hail.

***First Published in _Stirring_

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.

***First Published in _Slow Trains_


Fickle Sand

Near Mazatlan, white salt
rides the wave swell like cream.
Eclogues in the dusty sheep,
barefoot children
huddled in tortilla tents. 
Their gunny sacks too thin for flour.
The moon digs with the bowl
of its spoon, a flashlight
in skeleton rib.  All that is left
of a home is the dust.
"She's just a sneaky leprechaun,
this girl of yours."
The ripe woman knows
conches of lost cutis, pearl --
yawning for grit of the same.

Her cheeks, a seamed mosaic plate,
cigarette between thin cracks
waving off the untoward gods.
Hair of oily demitasse
in heaving braids down curving spine.
"I won't lie," she says.
"This clay you shape is fickle sand.
Held by wish and little else."
Her breasts giggle at truth,
delivered like eggs of tender cache.
"I am turtle-hard old.
Acquainted with slick lust,
the blackened flower."
Wrinkled palms for water jugs,
she strains her knuckles into leaves,
hands his thirst a filtered tear.

***First Published in _Facets_


Fond Pastiche

As facts go, it was an odd strain:
child-less breeding motherly-love.
One would think that an empty womb,
a slit balloon of womanhood,
would yield despairing desert sands --
that vacancy’'s burn would build a fence.
But ways you gave reversed clichés,
dropped parachutes where eyes expected
envy's shrapnel, acid leaks of estrogen.
When Mother died, you wore her slippers,
held me as a well must do
with floating candles in its throat.
Listened like a forest does
when saws and plows invade its soil.

Our bathtub scenes remind me of emotive bliss
unwritten in most family scripts:
I helped you to the cast iron tub,
got the water steaming hot.
Tossed in Mr. Bubble grains
and added oil of lavender.
There I sat. My bottom on the toilet seat--
both feet on the countertop,
eating donuts I'd bought for you,
casting crumbs at your Persian kitten
jealous of our intimacy. 

I dried your back and helped you out,
put coffee in your sugar cup so Father
would think you were eating healthy,
following the doctors' rules.
"Interesting men," you always said,
"are the bricks of sanity's hearth.
Kiss your husband on the lips,
but pick him for his head."
Wisdom laughed but left its mark,
like a paintbrush stains an empty canvas,
its fumes diluted by falling rain.
Every tear I dropped in oceans,
your patience went deep sea fishing for.
You brushed off trouble in my life
like aphids from a yawning rose.

***First Published by Cayuse Press

Innocence & Opera

At age 13, balcony seats
for La Bohème were a strange cage
for an unmet world.
Swooshing skirts, sweet perfume,
shiny pearls, opera lenses
looped and turned like old
and tired paper clips.
I had not scored the tragic moments
of my life; had not traveled,
kicking, clawing, fighting moons
to jagged edges of the cliff.

You tried to whisper in my ear --
music could prepare the world
for ragged clothes and cruelties
but I was deaf with rosy luck.
Fleshly curtains still enjoyed
their hooks and folds.
I chewed on gum, tapped
fingers on the arms of chairs --
impatient with drama and trills.
Lusty voices sang a game.
Weeping women next to me
seemed overzealous waterfalls --
I thought I'd always be a rock.

Then some thirty years beyond,
you argued for a quick
and gentle ride away --
there I sat beside your bed.
The story had a different seal
on envelopes pressed
squarely into sweating hands.
Later I would read the plot
as camisoles for heavy coats
of coming death, warm tea
with sugar cubes for grace
on saucers touched and trembling.


Love's Cervix

In bandwidth of your cherishing,
I spray, divide like
ashes fall from cigarettes,
the burn dispersed by tenderness. 
L'amour encore
I once considered consummate ghost,
seaweed thread on shifting rock,
is now quite full Chrysanthemums.
Taller, thicker, year by year.
Coloring cracks of starving soil.

Worms of age, our graying hair--
learned tarnish on a tray.
You finger me like brie en croute,
spread my senses on a cracker,
shaking longing's tambourine.
Serving sunlight to a moon
that gathered smoke and chimney soot.
Blended bliss from lifting corns--
a kiss some kind of medicine.

My mother said, "You'll need a man
with patience for the thorns of loss,
who'll carry you across the desert,
feed you ice chips in the night
when motion's moisture will not fall
even from packed clouds of will."
He'll have to be a pointed greyhound
higher than the hurdles stand.
As magic as the wand of passion
is at times of bodies pressed,
love's cervix ain't anatomy.

***First Published in _The Pittsburgh Quarterly_


Pitch

"It was getting late. Late for an easy rescue or escape.
Late to go back to how things were. Late."

Richard Picciotto, FDNY, author of Last Man Down

You call it all "a tension
that could snap a bridge."
Bollard on bight, knot on knot
secured by sheer adrenaline.
I saw it on a TV screen
three thousand miles away from grief.
Grit you breathed like bags of flour,
corpses for trinkets of memory's gold.
Pinched between the walls of flame,
gray tombs of smoke painting
an indigo sky a shade of permanent black.

Some men wield the Phoenix reach,
take another hand in theirs.
Fling the pitchfork into hell,
bring a Brooklyn woman home
as if she's queen of fifty
rattled, anxious states.
Every gaze you made at light
was pepper stinging in your eyes.
Petty fingers on the keys
can't capture what you did that day.
Clawing through the mounds of rubble,
dancing on the shard and thorn.

Who'd have thought this maze of terror
could braid a rope of angel wings.
Pitch will linger in your lungs
like moss on brick, like gnats on fruit.
Bruises will be slow to heal.
I salute the loves you saved
by carving paths through
warped collages of the ash.
The sickle of a hero shines
in jungles of a wrongful world.

***First Published in _The Book of Remembrance_


Paint Me

Chest hair is a silver stash.
I love sorting their memos of age,
their tiny perky wisdom files.
It's a little garden here,
a populace of soft gray spikes
striking back at rain swords
rusting the summer
on a tight schedule of death.
Incense in the gentle heave.
Your sigh in my ear --
jasmine and alyssum seed,
lick reply correcting
the raven's teeth,
cushioning assiduous blow.
Meeting decay with the slick
hush money of lip against lip,
tulip style.
A buffetting as the ship
rocks in the salt sea.

We are the chunnel
beneath the moors
now stripped of birds,
thick with white rice frost.
You touch old bearings as they turn.
Je t'aime. Je t'aime.
The raft appears.
The wave will win -- of course it will.
Eerie as a waiting teardrop
stewing right behind an eye.
But I will be braver, now,
when needles of ice
come for my wish.
Paint me with your tongue
before the brush crumbles
to morsel and grain --
and there is no option left
but the consumate black.


The Old Packard

Raindrops gelled
against the glass --
fiery opals on
a mission from stone.
The gutted Packard,
once spit-shined loafers,
heavy metal luxury.
Its carcass now
the voice of rust
with critters
nesting in the cracks.

She's leaning out
windows to smoke.
Her skirt bunched up,
invaded by bliss.
She's braiding his tie
and his belt and her bra,
some trinity of lust and hope.
Square foam dice,
hanging from
a rear view mirror,
fate rounded some
but kindly left to tumble
in the passing wind.

I imagine the rumbles
in the split back seat.
Drive-in lights
for a Saturday moon.
Those were the days
when tires were full.
A woman's red nails
scratching their way
down his spine.
Their hot breath
fogging the Northern Star.
At sweet sixteen,
no rats, just dreams.
Rivers had such hormones then.

***First Published in _The Foliate Oak_


Our West Side Story of Romance

On slippery roofs
of tested roots,
my pain had turned
to inward streams.
Tributaries of a kiss
around a scar
were foreign soil
and I was armed.

Molars of my destiny
were locked in
braces of withdrawal.
The collagen of giving hands
seemed more like lies
than truths to trust.
A firecracker lit and launched,
left to fizzle in the rain.

Our West Side Story
of romance has crawled
through cracks of cyber-clay.
You see my bones as serenades
that need a ukulele strummed.
Faith in herds, in swarms,
in flocks, its awkward cows
in search of troughs.

Pity's cellulite is gone.
Muscles live in aching space.
The way old prunes
become new plums. 
The way sad endings
shave their legs.

 

All poetry 

© Janet Buck

Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee and winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Octavo, CrossConnect, Poetry Magazine.com, The Montserrat Review, Offcourse, The Pedestal Magazine, Megaera, Southern Ocean Review, PoetryBay, Kenwood Review, The Rose & Thorn, Red River Review, Coelacanth, Facets Magazine, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Janet's second print collection, Tickets to a Closing Play, was the winner of the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award; the book is scheduled for publication in October, 2003. For links to more of her work, see: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html

Reviews:

"Someone once said that grace is the ability to accept change. If one word could be used to describe the poetry of Janet Buck that word would indeed be grace." The Kenwood Review

"Tickets to A Closing Play is a passionate, daring book, a far-reaching work of honesty, beauty and power." Ruth Daigon, editor of Poets On and author of Handfuls of Time

"Ms. Buck's poetry has become a staple for many Internet journals. She is prolific and talented. Her metaphors are as original as her voice" Steve Mueske, editor of Three Candles

http://www.janetbuck.com