USA

JBuck22874@aol.com

A Box of Pictures

It took me years to lift the lid.
Still, they stung like paper cuts.
In London, at age 26,
your teeth were baby powder white.
Lined in red and mute desire,
puffy as a ripe cocoon.
The Thames slid by
in almost gray complacency.
In Paris, crooked curls of hair
played paint brush on a canvas moon.
Purse and shoes and hats all matched.
Nylons had no tiny runs.

Your husband shot a roll of film --
to document the simple ways
you crossed your legs,
cougar thighs beneath a skirt.
I wonder if you capped
his lens by kissing it,
laughed about the smudge you left.
Hurried back to cheap hotels,
fingered zippers in your haste,
littered floors with stack of clothes.
Rubbed your body into his,
furnace ticking like a watch.

At 53, before he died, chestnut cloaks
on shoulder blades and onyx brows
showed creeping silver
eating at the noble fur.
At 68, a pint of gin beside the bed.
Your teeth a row of licorice drops.
At 89, your knuckles, skin
like cloth and thread,
beaten by the wringer's bolt,
a little more aware of graves
by brushing up against the stone --
ginger root and taffeta
still smelling of the sweaty dance.

"A Box of Pictures": first published in Verse Libre Quarterly

The Dampened Year

Some of the year is now a scab --
the heal is slow, so slow
it could be waning breath.
Naked limbs of sycamores are lashing
on the window pane,
little belts of reminisce
reminding me of heaviness.
I kiss you under mistletoe,
heedless of its lumpish sprigs,
its fraying ribbon hanging
from a driven nail.
Maybe we required some ark
to make our rivers seem like
prongs on single forks.

I still see bodies tumbling from upper floors,
linen napkins full of rocks;
no one knows who planted them,
even though sin has a face
and we have walked with bombs in shoes.
I still taste ash without an urn
to close the chapter of a life.
Find peppercorns in Christmas socks,
imagine all the mantles bare
and tears for kindling in a hearth.

Soil the flat geography, maps become
so hard to read, but grateful isn't neutral now.
The marshmallow moon got burned, went black.
It rains in little razor blades,
paper cutters on a throat;
shingles rattle in the wind.
I hope it snows on New Year's Eve
to rinse the stricken memory.
This time I will watch the white
so near the flame it could be torched.
Perhaps we'll be that tiger of a marigold
that doesn't die on season's cue
and fog won't smell of mustard gas.
But shopping seems like painting nails
when fingers have been lost in doors.

Sonnets & Slums

The last few days were plastic lighters --
click and click a thousand times
and still no flame.
You lay there in the August heat
three shades of cemetery gray.
Gravestone/iceberg/albatross,
an avalanche without much
mercy for the road.
Your body had that jerky texture,
burlap falling from the root.

Birds sat on the window sill,
all lined up in sky dress blues.
Saluting what I couldn't watch.
I had that dizzy innocence
which makes you think
a river can be toilet-trained
and doesn't rise
from shouldered storms.
You looked at death
as invitations scratched
in fine calligraphy.

Ready as a crooked nail
to leave a wall with holes
too large to keep its pin.
Crows agreed the raven
lived a touch away, bickered
over sprinkled grain.
The earth was scones
and fates were teeth.
I wanted the end to bite its tongue,
to hold-up someone's house.
Thrusting lyrics at the prose,
I wanted sonnets in the slums.

"Sonnets & Slums": first published in Verse Libre Quarterly

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