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This Verdant Quilt

Each morning, scars grow
thick and smooth like fishing worms
as aging shrinks the last blue lake.
This verdant quilt of tragedy:
I turn it over in the night,
twist it like a crumbling sponge,
fashion lectures to my bones
that do not listen to my will.
Every step I take these hours
is set to music of a moan.
I struggle with its gasping sound.
Are you listening from the grave?

I wonder how you'd meet my words,
their shovels perched
against the ever-leaning tree.
Would you have called my stump "a stump"
and not "oh, that" -- that thing
we do not air or show
in tissue-lined and fancy boxes
dining in the normal world.
Would you have learned a keyboard waltz
to follow where the pain and strife
led me into lyric caves?
I touch your photo on the wall,
take it down when substitutes
come calling on a holiday --
think of grief as wedding rings
we might have rolled across
the swollen knuckle's hill.

Perhaps you would have helped a tad
with homework of the falling tears --
caught old baseballs of that hail
even when they rolled in mud.
As it stands, they stay hard stones,
harder than the looking glass.
If death had never stolen you --
I might have known what size
your shoulders really were.
Victim of the emerald moss around
the lips of wishing wells,
I write them into heroines.

Thus a Poem

Hammered by the present ache,
I reach inside old grieving socks --
their threadbare scones I count upon
to find a reason for these crumbs.
We fight about a wheelchair --
that one long word that
strands me like a dead raccoon,
slams the door of conversation,
beats cold whipping cream of Hell.
How can I make you see --
step after step after step
is what defines my very soul,
makes a slab of bathroom glass
worth buffing in the morning sun.
I'd simply rather fall than sit,
though eyes remind me constantly
my body is the whore of grace.

Suffer's worm trail might just
lead you to the flower,
but I would wish you darkness
and no fathoming beside
the torture of that choice.
I'll sulk alone and publish art
that's only grime on teapots
growing grayer from a lack of hands.
Thus a poem -- its rising bile,
acid reflux of this war.
I write about a nursing home --
its grisly walls are not
the flockings of my fate.
Piss upon the sheets is clean,
posing sadness at a distance;
music there is easier.
There my limbs are lightning bolts,
not the victim of the tree.
There my fingers point their sticks
at stones I have the strength to turn.

Inside a Name

I whisper her name aloud --
you tug at a chair to gather your coat,
pet the dog and say goodbye
before a question
kicks you in the tender groin.
Your eyelids curtsy once and clench --
a mirror of the coffin’s hinge.
I'd like to follow roads you take,
through briars of the fruitless vines,
down sharp, dry cliffs
that crumble at the slightest wind.
Our silence is my orphanage,
but you don't know the windows
you have blocked from light.

Hand me just a sweater's sleeve,
some syntax, context, anything
that spells the way she made the bed
into a novel packed with lust
and happiness now cherry pits.
Her memory is snow in summer,
smelly oil on concrete floors
of some garage I sense is cold.
Nearly fifty years have passed.
Sores should own a scar or two,
but closure is impossible
without exposure to the air.

I'd like to follow roads you take,
even if this island has no sustenance
and storms direct the weather vanes.
Death might have been a melody
we rode until the song came back.
I step on leaves around her grave,
hear the crunch of missing heels,
stay the hungry hummingbird,
who cannot find the center
of a rose removed --
wings on fire for searching
through the muted spring.

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