USA

jbuck22874@aol.com

Licenses of 90+

Summer's dirt is a dry birthday cake.
With licenses of 90+,
you drag the hose along the curb.
Dressed in aged translucent skin,
wispy as that pastry phyllo wrapped
around those crushed pecans.
Skimpy, checkered boxer shorts,
their billows pregnant with the air,
make you laugh that itchy chortle,
raise the eyebrows rolling by.
I wonder from my filthy car
sitting at a nearby light
(its red just teasing me to run),
if I should quit my 9-5
and help you water daffodils.
Their lanky stalks, a perfect mirror
of your legs, mostly husk,
their yellow trumpets almost straw
minding nature's savagery,
its winding toward oblivion.

From the house, its shingles
thick as fingernails that grow for years
then suddenly return to flesh,
your wife is waving flabby arms,
reminding you to cut the grass.
Its patches brown and weathered now --
puzzle pieces dogs have chewed
on tables of a waiting tomb.
The mower sits, a Pharaoh
full of rust and grit,
a book of action dwelling
on the chapters torn --
what blisses it has bagged and cast
in duty's putrid jewelry box.
"One last piss on pending grave"
is all you cough in firm retort.
Water dribbles from your spout
like sprayed saliva on a word.

Soliloquy to Bitter Sky

"I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years
and have hardly made a rent in it."

   Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

I drop on tea cup knee at the lip of your grave,
its stone and sand, its vacancy,
amid sharp emerald blades of grass.
My heart these days, a lost screw
looking for its proper hole.
What bend should rivers fist and take?
Mother whom I've never known --
speak like suns through mucus under puffy lids.
The fingers of my tears are sore
from running up and down the keys.
You are gone, but Father is alive and here,
pacing tunnels of his grief,
hugging like he's swatting flies,
loving from behind thick doors
with dead bolts set above the knobs
my sweating palms have tried to turn.
A part of me is longing to retort to rock,
gather chisels, hone a love
without a dead museum chill.

Soliloquies are lonely forms;
paper burns to whiskey's torch.
A listen wreath is all I ask.
Each time I pour, each time I serve
another meal, I water flowers
shrinking in their chosen paths.
My tarnished temples,
lathered in their silver streaks,
curl themselves around his ear,
beg for conches of the sea
to leave a pearl beside the shrugs.
Our instruments have drying reeds.
Moments seem like ash to tap,
sequins falling from a dress.
In dreams, I wrote a different score.
Soon these seeds will ride the wind.
Task of music sits before this orchestra.
Hours grow late around this waste.

The Real Stradivarius

Another brunch of surly nerves.
Liquor sets the basic rules.
It's 10 a.m.  A bottle's cork
assumes its throne of porous wood.
All my wishful clamoring,
a kitten at a Brillo screen.
I cook to please and rinse the plates,
tossing scraps of batter burned,
disappointment's petrie dish.
My stomach growls, but not for food.
Our fences higher than our kites.
Paper you will never read
is coveting a crushed pecan.

Combine the ether with the chill
and all my love just hits the road.
It's packing time inside the dream
and I hear music in the wind.
I listen for the gravel spit,
rinse your teeth marks from my neck,
study bruises years have gathered
sadly like bouquets of flowers.
My tires full of angry air I wish were just
a summer breeze that didn't cannon heritage.
Emotion's awkward overture,
a sand dune blowing in your eyes.

Perhaps we are an instrument
I haven't tuned and didn't play,
but I am tired and soaked in tears
that never found receptacles.
My heart must pound, direct its pulse,
in pastures where amour refracts,
where green is more than shades of jealous,
chilly jade of dollar bills, musty in their lethargies.
The real Stradivarius is miles away in cherry pies
with parents who have sorted pits,
shred their rinds and reveled in
the moisture of a rocky sea.
Where cherishing is noisy doorbells
ringing in the darkest night
with slippers there to answer cries
from deep inside the wilderness.

The Echo of the End

"These be
Three silent things:
The Falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead."

           Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)

Women chat their mockeries.
Discuss their dull advantages,
applying them like salt on wound.
Whispering gossip as if.
As if it will ply accordions
of wrinkled cheeks, brittle
in their aching scores --
play a song, a better one.  
Their ears perking
at the sound of slaughter.
Light as jockeys on a horse,
house keys jingle in a purse.
Out of sugared thunderheads,
comes lightening strike:
"Lucille, you know, is dying.
It's only a matter of time."
They crunch on crumbs
with quiet teeth.
Echoes of the end are near.

Gasps inside this utterance --
short stray threads on blankets
of their bosoms reeling from the facts.
Their passive grief, a bank acount.
Silence kicks remaining shins.
Sadness smears their fingerprints.
Too soon a check will bounce and spit
on hands that scribbled signatures.
A grave comes up like indigestion's evidence
spewed across a slippery floor.
Mouths slam shut on scissored hour.
I watch the bruises spread
across their knees, as if they're
blood bags of a prayer.
Pneumonia in their lungs like rain.

© Copyright, Janet I. Buck.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.