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Very Little Chamomile

Acres of mute gray walls
and white rectangular beds.
No couples -- just one chipped cup
next to another's loneliness.
Green tanks and tubes
for grass and rain.
Nurses and aides all work --
based on the itch to leave.
The canyon moan, the
nostril's echo of barbarous times.
Each uttered word a pocket
I could fall inside if I stopped.

Boxes of chocolates
run into their puddles of guilt,
delivered and left
in pinches of sunlight
streaming through blinds.
All this voodoo has failed.
My distant love and wish feel cheap.
There really is no chamomile --
just legs and arms
under the sheets like wet cigars.
A check for the rent refusing
to coddle the withering hand.

The Bamboo Cane

I call you "Mom" and women
in the locker room
chuckle fondly at our game.
They know from rumors
pasted to the graying walls
my mother died when I was three.
That was my delivered hand:
a perfect daddy for the king;
no queen inside the standing deck.
Her name in Sanskrit on a tomb --
Father grew illiterate
and grief erased his memory.

So much of what I say to you
I wish I could have said to her --
I wish her strength had been around
to lift my weakness weighing in.
Carousels go 'round and 'round
without the music of reply.
I fiddle with your bamboo cane
as if the swamp has reeds
to clear and I need tools.
Need the midnight chats for two
that brush the sadness from the moon.

Moss around the dry, dry rock,
you tolerate my appetent lie
like straggly cats that hop a fence.
Voids are large, crater large.
I guess about the missing meat
in Christmas nuts and fingers
under woolen gloves.
Your hands are spielers in the dark,
lotion on the wrinkled wish
as they tuck in the tag on my shirt.
This simple reach -- a minor trill
from symphonies that never were.

The Blinding Torch

I can only imagine the room
in sterile, nauseating gray.
Fingers pushing things in place
like thumbtacks falling from the cork.
A cot with wires on which you slept
for six, unwieldy cliffs of months.
Pasty angels of the nurses
garbed in starched and planted smiles.
Little else but tucking in a blanket's edge,
plucking ovals from a daisy,
wishing for a miracle --
a pearl inside the gritty clam.

With cancer for his horoscope,
only waiting made the grade of real love --
which stomachs thorns that line the rose.
Blood bags sat to paint the pale cheek of death;
time would rub it white again.
Your pointed heels walked the halls,
bayonets so feckless in their bravery,
their clicking sounds, their empty guns.
Morphine drips for summer rain,
Hallmark cards in messy stacks
where someone spoke of uttered prayers
that ran like red from paper cuts.

Every year beyond his grave,
you called an hour the unmet kiss --
each fading sun, a blinding torch
that pointed to the splitting bark
as lightning scissors chosen trees.
I hoped you'd caulk the loneliness
with footsteps of another man --
they pad the darkness with the light --
but you were fine remembering
silver gauze of ancient moons --
the way they crossed the midnight sky
in firm beginnings long ago.

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