The Wasteland Where Your Body Slept

August 2002 | Janet Buck, poetry

In the wake of serpentine limos,
saccharine cards, carnation fields
arranged just so, the water
in Simon’s pond went black.
Our house grew laughless, tombstone cold —
spiders ran their gamuts of lace.
It was 1959 — computers hadn’t been born,
so Daddy deleted our stringless harps
with gin or a beer, something with ice
and a fragrance that stung.
I sensed it was our medicine.
I thought I should learn to pour.

Sunday was our lazy hour —
a game of camping under sheets.
The mattress seemed a vacant lot
some CAT had cleared by accident.
Lip of the cotton always infused
with the liquid of eyes.
Exhausted from spearing
unspearable moods like silver trout.
He sent me out to hunt a bear.
My tiny hands came back
with one of your socks still smelling
of leather in shoes that were gone.

I boxed your pillow with a fist
until the feathers left in air
like blackbirds struck by B-B guns.
Father’s bed, a wasteland now
where bridges of touch
seemed useless iron.
With rivers dry, no wonder
the lake of our chatter was low.
At barely four, I ran my digits
over the lumps of crumbling coal.
Found rattling gourds of his arms
reaching for flesh in a grave.

*First Published in Rustlings of the Wind

Stitches

August 2002 | Janet Buck, poetry

She walked straight into the gaping wound
of another woman’s death —
wondering no doubt, if such a war
could ever be won.
I was six, afraid of her clothes,
her swinging purse that pruned
dead limbs of unfixable dreams.
All at once, old photographs
came off the walls.
A moving truck arrived like mace.
Perhaps I grew envious moss
the color of emerald and grass.
Father’s kiss forgot my forehead,
tried her lips like brand new shoes.
I wanted them to pinch and hurt.
Suddenly I was pocket change —
she was stacks of dollar bills
bribing the grief to retreat.

I didn’t want a different draft
of sweet perfume on apron strings.
I didn’t want to sew a button
only to lose its circle to fate.
“You’ll call her Mom,” he said aloud.
With lilies gone, planted at tilts
around the stone of a grave,
I looked for black capes and a broom —
a cauldron of logical steam.
I didn’t want her slippers
lounging near the bed.
I didn’t want yours
boxed and left beside the trash
for passes of a Goodwill van.
I was still grabbing at sleeves
of your shirts like willow puffs that
settle away from a desperate hand.
“You’ll call her Mom,” he said aloud.
Those letters were shreddable stars.