The Roiling Sea

Sky is a quiet easel of gray;
you look at your lover and wait
as Frances moves closer to land,
her menacing eye calm in itself,
yet bordered by darkness and rain
in buckets too heavy to lift.
You've boarded the windows,
trimmed back oaks that might
drop gavels of their arms,
crushing what the wind leaves there
in dots of mercy growing vague.

Your voice sounds calm as if
you've made peace with a distant friend
perhaps called death, perhaps called life
banded by plights of destiny's arc.
So many pages of dreams
torn from the book.
So many orchids pinched
at the fragile neck.
So few lifeboats in this sea.
Maybe the color of blue
was a counterfeit bill.

The Lost Compass

With sour breath, brewed in
traces of whiskey and tar,
you pine for a sultry street in Mexico,
a dozen eager señoritas
rubbing away lonely hours.
You swallow pills
like candy corn on Halloween --
speak with pillows in your mouth.
Maybe you think the moon will be white
over a land that isn't here.

Mother cases your room for anything sharp.
Perhaps she should scour musty corners
for words and hues
of Sexton and Pollock and Woolf.
I wish we could read the truth
humming beneath our ribs.
Here at home, I play the game,
revising your sketchy résumé
to muffle the loss of a dozen jobs:
"relocation" is a lie, but it's all I have
to rinse the mud from bellies of the River Styx.

Mother insists you need the rigor
of Sunday Mass, steady work
to lift the crucible nails of fainéant time.
I beg for us all to open our eyes,
my thumb on the doorbell,
pressing my flesh to leave a print
someone will find when they dust
to explain the grave you chose.
When will we act like flocks of geese --
where one moves forward to carve the way,
fondle the force of a bitter wind --
where one falls ill and another
attends to rituals of health or death.
I look for a compass in art:
find my weakness staring back.


September 10th, 2004

Something should be said out loud
about tomorrow's date, circling back
for the third raw moment in time
when vivid skies bewitched themselves --
peacock blue to dusty black.
The rapist of hope has never been caught.
Pollen of his hatred thick
as every season flips its page.
His wirey beard unwriting
every tale of God we knew
would once deliver us.
I stare at the glass on my watch,
wanting to trick two metal hands
trundling forward on thinning prayer.

Blame has blossomed on trees,
pummeled shores with acrid tides,
leaving mounds of brine and bone.
Bodies that floated like feathers
will never be birds again.
Sacred days belong with a peace rose
dried in a book, but hours rehearse
each morbid moment crushing
innocence with curse.
We're so afraid our midnight chimes
will carry deathblows in their bells.
It's wrong to divorce rubble and ash --
forget, then dance a facile dance
in softly falling rain.

Absence & Ache

If this were plain old age --
that ugly, stubborn customer of all
our whittled destinies --
perhaps I could sleep
after watching you struggle to walk.
No hands. No feet.
So cheerful as they bring you legs
of carbon, and plastic and screws.
Your elbows swing like hangers
without shirts in a trailer
shaken by storm.

The vacant air, your silhouette
of avid sadness lingering
with cobwebs on the graying walls.
At twelve, you're far too young
to memorize how sunlight
blisters verdant leaves,
how clouds deliver piercing hail --
way too young
to wear mortality's sleeve
in empty pockets where fingers
should dangle and dream.

^

Biography

Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in Poetry Magazine.com, Offcourse, Octavo, The Pedestal Magazine, Facets Magazine, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Janet's second print collection of poetry, Tickets to a Closing Play, was the winner of the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award and her third collection, Beckoned By The Reckoning, was released by PoetWorks Press in the spring of 2004. This Autumn, her work is forthcoming in Kaleidowhirl, Wicked Alice, and 2River View. The poem 'Absence & Ache' previous appeared in the jounral Octavo.

For links to more of her work, see:
http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html and www.janetbuck.com