Janet Buck: four poems

THE VILLAGE VOICE

In wet grass lay a man-
head down feet sunk
in autumn leaves like raisins
in an oatmeal pond.
Reading intently ink of earth
our cars had streaked
and left behind.
Gold mucus in his hair
from rain and summer's
crusts of scattered bread.
His shirt a soggy cardboard box-
edges muted by sweat and grit.

I wanted, that moment,
to snatch his book.
To see what he learned
so near the ground.
His restive beard of snowy gray
rattled as he chuckled lightly;
pages turned in crook of wind.

We were scissors cutting
into shapes of myths.
Headlights looked like flies to swat.
A flock of pigeons in a diamond
aiming South but ending North
where cold became removal's birth.
He was an easel for land's repose.
A paint brush pressed against a canvas--
village voice by happenstance
that measured blind iniquity.

THE DARK CLOSET

Rifling through a clammy closet
all I saw were loaded guns:
wrinkled purses of your past,
shoes in heaps,
uneven rows I knew
my feet could never fill.
Rain outside was
brushing teeth of noble fir;
I was wallowing in mud.

Mouth, a vacuum of dry thirst,
passing kidney stones of grief.
Dresses wrapped around your ghost.
Neckline jewels in blood tattoos.
A mother taking sniffs from diapers-
after infants pass away.
Hope was hangers facing wrong.
Patience clipped and pendulous-
raking grass that time would mow.

Regal quills, once on habits of a throne,
were chickens in a nest of straw.
Dime store candles of my words
would fail to bring you back again.
Walls and dust were
keepers of an aching soul.
Scent of all that lavender
condemned by mothballs of my tears.
A pen was just a skeleton
beside lost feathers of a bird.

COLD ASH

I'm not asleep, yet not awake.
Thrashing some, in pockets
of a heaving quilt.
A ruckus in the living room
snaps me out of lingering.
Feathers drift in muggy air
as if a cannon blew a slug
through pillow cases of a cloud.
Our puppy barks hysterically,
calls me to the carnage site.
Is this her way of grieving loss,
to carry it between her teeth?
A bird that once defied the wind
sits in a lump of cold ash.
Eyes rolled back in slow retreat-
two marbles shutting sunlight out.

A frenzied rush of hailstones
begins like sudden symphonies.
I grab a strainer from the drawer,
scoop it toward the open sky.
It falls like bricks and stone clichés
of wars I've only read about.
I think we ought to bury it,
but Gretel sees things differently.
She prances with her victory
as if she owns this trophy's meat.
I fill an empty coffee cup
and think I'm tasting wasted blood.
Who, this day, is training whom
for battles of mortality?
We argue over carcasses.
Her jaws are quicker than my hands.
Gray. Limp. Still.
No wizard will reboot this bliss.
Sphincter of its pencil feet--
the amputated legs of gods.
All the other winged angels
chirp their mourning arias.

HURRICANES WE MIGHT HAVE NURSED

I am that bird, that flock of grief
that flies south.
Like studied darts, I aim at warmth
I have not found
in territories of your pulse.
The ones you've fenced,
the ones you've locked
no pen can saw or bend or break.
I stare so hard at vacant screens,
at what we might have been and done,
how we might have loved-
unfettered by our quietus.

An ash falls on my robe,
burns a hole I brush and pick.
I swear out loud at travesties.
Hurricanes we might have nursed
until they turned a summer breeze.
My lips, the mimes of wishing wells,
sorry, sad, and foaming angst.
Staring at our leather scars
seated at a bloody feast
rinsing clots in Chardonnay.

Circuses of silences are folding tents
weighed down by rain,
the kind that falls on pillow linen
wrinkled by the unkissed night.
All our sorrows paranoid,
schizophrenic, slobbering
in halos on the hats of beer.
In the breadline of a dream,
I send myself like a half-licked stamp,
hoping I won't peel and drop
into the void - unread, untouched
uncradled in this onyx hour.