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Our Mothers Who Might Have Been Art

You and I are all we have
exchanging the wafered tear.
Our mothers who might have been art
in firm stone steps -- are rocks
in the buckling knee,
knees in the minikin groin.
Yours lies in the psycho ward;
mine has money to keep her
staring with slurred pupils
and oatmeal tongues
through cold gray bars.

We needed their thermometers
for temperatures of climbing pain.
We needed their buckets
for wells of our strength.
Our diaries, this same black ink --
two daughters widowed by a drug.
I'm reading in the waiting room,
picking at hours, impatient and raw,
screaming at scalpels
to work their magic and leave.

My eyes and my will mow sentences --
the same damn grass again
and again 'til it's short.
When you come back to the world,
I will lift you wherever you wish to go.
My arms will be cradles and cribs,
slippers and shoes
neither of us has ever worn
into the bleak of an onyx night.
When you come back to the world,
we'll pass the platter of impotent rage,
discover the sugar, the nuts
sprinkled over the crumbs.

Like Ginger Root

Two months beyond the scar of grave
we could be mad at messes you left:
bags of flour roaming with bugs;
tarnished silver, geyser gray,
tea cups with their handles loose.
Bedroom slippers quick as mice
reminding us who owned
the corners of this dark.
It's time to go back and clean,
my sister said, as if she were
boxing alyssum tears
that crumble from mistaken touch.
If we scrubbed with the metal of will,
the bourbon of grief would leave --
we did until our palms
went raw and bled on lace.
Found burlap bags of tulip bulbs
the sun had started on its own.
Cobwebs and clumps of Persian hair
were tropes with a fabric of past.

We brushed and mopped
as maids erase some crazy night,
shake their heads at semen pools.
Uniforms of stoic bras with metal
in their sagging circles weren’t
enough to hold a tomb with stinging rocks
that multiplied like winter hail.
We shook out oriental rugs --
hyper kids we meant
to settle down for bed.
They followed, clung,
they wetted, screamed
in margins of our memories.
I guess your stain deserved to stay.
"Out out, damned spot"
never worked for heroines
in Shakespeare's velvet tragedies.
Fruit stand gone, but still we knew
an Eden once dripped cherry juice.
Rooms still bore your fragrances --
glued to meat like ginger root.

The Whispering Fridge

Mother was the practical voice
among the ruins.
"She's been dead a week.
We have to clean out the fridge.
Bring rubber gloves ...
God knows what we'll find."
I wasn't amused. But I went,
as if could guard your memory
from trite complaints
that surface to release such grief.
One foot in the present mess;
the other in a relished past.

The milk was sour.
On cardboard spouts,
a touch of Revlon's Devil Red
that said your lips
refused to bother with a glass.
Cheesecake turned a swampish green.
Potatoes had multiple eyes.
While mine lived blind
to your colorful flaws.
Six apples left I hadn't peeled.
A jar of jam a decade old --
under its lid a gray mold scar
of suffering on top of seeds.
White tuna for your Persian cat.
The can had whiskers in its bowl.

All our midnight meetings there
came back to me -- a rush
of pennies falling from a latch-less purse
turned upside-down in effigy.
The day we licked pink frosting
off your birthday cake,
lunged at the sugar and cream,
left shiny forks inside the drawer.
I wasn't prepared for blizzard chills
so stinging and so permanent
they tore the month of August out
from pages of the calendar.

***First Published in The Red Booth Review

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