The Poetry of

Janet Buck

Too Many Seasons of War

The manifesto of war --
dark hollows of mass graves,
curtains of falling ash,
grenades beneath a pile of fruit,
reasons for steel battleships --
have slipped like stray receipts
between gray cushions on the couch.
The print is starting to fade.
Memories turn rigid, shrink
like corns on a toe crammed
in a shoe a size too small.
A soldier's mom redecorates
the walls behind a bolted door.
Walking ahead is the only choice;
yet this limp needs tending too
like gardens of perennials.
We're leaning on forgetful arms.

Sorrow's wound revives itself
at Sunday school
when widows of Tikrit inflate a sigh,
pray for little scraps off joy --
eyes wincing into tiny slits
miniscule as strands of wild rice.
Sunrise is a gaudy shade
like lipstick on old cigarettes,
too pretty to live on a land of shame.
The diaper of an orchid's leaf
so white beside dry wasted blood.
That pearl onion moon,
sometimes full, sometimes
just a curving clove --
I wonder if it's well-deserved
or just blind luck
when it comes to daggers of light.

*First Published in Wicked Alice

March 11th, Madrid

"It is not raining. Madrid is crying."

Jorge Mendez

Haunting digits of "11" again --
two years, six months to the day
when blizzards of smoke swarmed
for miles, when flesh and faith
dissolved in a mattress of ash.
11 million march in Spain
for justice and evasive peace.
Twisted steel of railway cars,
body bags lined on a concrete slab --
rows of molars charred by hate.
A sullied sense of God
stands firm against the biting storm.
A child drops a rosary,
begs for just one bead to float.

Steady streams of hearses roll
the city streets,
skies of popped umbrella heads
form a canvas under clouds.
A convention center
billets a makeshift morgue:
can you hear alliteration
of the terror in every breath
we hold and keep,
feel the calloused hands
on a shoulder's diving slope,
taste sorrow in the rain?
Castanets -- silent
as castaway bone.

*First Published in Mindfire Renewed

The Messenger

The garden is an old lover
who fades and returns
only when winter decides.
Stone gray weeks suggest
no anchors but doubt; over and over
I squirm for a sunrise to paint.
Trowels and tools wear rust with pride.

Roses, no matter how much
I water our roses staked in the earth,
they wait like closed pistachios
for storms to set their nipples free.
They mock my eyes straining hard,
mock my hunger for color;
a moody sky controls it all.

I name each bush like a favorite aunt,
a messenger laced with perfume
to study and mime when hours grow dark.
These scholars of true renaissance
without a book to guide their stems,
saffron centers of a war-torn world
insisting that beauty has two good feet
and a road to follow home.

*First Published in Offcourse

Fabian Spring

Winter stayed too long --
a lover with sour breath
huffing for miles and miles.
Suddenly gray clouds part ways
like an envelope torn;
metered rain of grief just stops;
and skies grow creamy blue.
We plant a tree rose in the yard,
careful not to snap its neck,
careful not to tear
jade wings of leaves.
A curious rinse of light,
an avatar of basic hope.
The world is now
a painting to hang.

*First Published in Facets Magazine

Carrots in Dirt

I was only eight, my nails
unpainted and pale.
We had no maids, no gardeners
to trim the hemlock, thin the ivy
climbing rows of cracking bricks.
Round confrères of rising suns
spun amber light --
this is what we had for jewels.
Canning jars in every size
replaced expensive Chardonnay
in a cellar with grit on the stairs.

This memory is worlds away --
smothered in thick diesel fumes
of a white Mercedes-Benz --
deafened by nights
of Chevas and tinkling ice.
Yet in ink, it all comes back.
We washed dull panes with vinegar
and clothing rags; every stroke
was worth the view.
Laundry chatted on the line;
missing buttons found a shirt.

If I stretch, I smell
the fragrant bygone soil,
hear your anodyne voice,
witness broad canoes of smiles
that lit cold mornings of our chores.
Your muddy knuckles worked the earth
as if a mission rang its bell;
water dropped from mutton clouds
in time to meet our rhythmic prayers.
We planted ruddy marigolds
to save the lettuce from the hares.
Your hands were maps worth reading then.

*First Published in The Pedestal Magazine

The Perpetual River

This August your death
will be a decade old --
and I will remain a flagrant child
plopping my foot at the base
of a door that wants to close.
No doubt you'd side with
gusts of wind even as I challenge them.
Death should be a set of tonsils
a pen or a scalpel removes,
but it isn;t -- it's always wadi and storm
running through pastures we love.

Lost memories are Hitchcock's seagulls
in a room -- their beaks all darts
aimed at circles of a meal.
Edgar's ravens in deep, omniscient black,
shouting from branches, taking up space.
Seasons pass on calendars,
but lack a color I cannot name.
If you were here, you'd chide me
for wasting the pulse of a sun,
for missing the taste of raspberry tea
while its fragrant and randomly hot.

*First Published in Facets Magazine

Vernal Ground

Charcoal clouds pledge a light wax of rain,
but we'll water as soon as we plant --
in case that lusty kiss is a severed vow,
arid as loves of distant years.
Horizons now are healthier.
Our marriage is a painting in oil
that bullets of rain, lashings of wind
might wrestle with, but can't destroy.
I roll this luck like rosaries
between arthritic thumbs.

Skin will soon be curled leaves
and bone reduced to sand,
yet kneeling beside you,
massaging the soil
smells of inexplicable wealth.
Even bristled dandelions
have suns inside their rounded pills.
I have forgotten in glimpses of blue
how gray and icy truth had grown.
I tended this garden alone.

We can't sow joy
with apparitions standing there,
hopping on our curving backs,
so we pull up bamboo tongues
of ancient lilies, cut them off
like neckties from the dead.
I separate the pony packs,
unknot the roots, align
the promise of color, busy myself
snapping crooked geranium stalks
in search of a center of green.
You measure the holes between
our answers to graves.

*First Published in The Bohemian Rag

Facing This

The bed sat undisturbed,
as if you hadn't moved for hours,
as if the wind had settled into silences.
I knew you were restless to leave,
restless as crisp, dry sheets
of autumn oaks and brittle shrubs
outside the grimy windowpanes.
Your hands and hair -- the musty scent
of attics and secrets and wool.
Facing these unfaceables
took columns of strength
I could not pin in place -- and you --
you sat so quietly resigned to death
as if its candle led to roses not to graves.
No words do justice to this wreck.
Even verse is pillows of a flat balloon.
It's August and I'm cold again.

I tried to be a can of Glade,
spraying walls with mock lavender,
cinnamon tea, vanilla musk,
whatever paltry hope my palms
could force on the room.
Your eyes wrote books correcting me --
their going asteroids were bright,
passing my body in stone
like a bus in some ravine
waiting for religion's tow
that stirred the dust but never came
to clear this carnage from the road.
Nine years later, art is still
preoccupied with guns of sadness
aimed at temples of the heart --
grief is still a clove of garlic
fragrant as the first green shoot.

*First Published in Poetry Magazine.com

The Tea Kettle

I thought tea kettles

murmured a soft whistle of calm

in the hallowed light

of a wisened hour,

but ours is foghorn loud,

touting a foreign chill

like a ship too close

to Dover's jagged cliffs.

A warning that moments

are fleeting lilac buds.

The sentence coming from steam:

press your hands against clay cups

while water is gratefully warm,

while fragrance is there.

It's all about what's there --

scent of pine,

oiled leather of ancient books,

incense of geraniums --

when it's out of your nostrils,

it's gone.

The Haunted Month

For so many years,

September was a bridge

from wrinkled bulbs

of last tomatoes on the vine

to primal layers of frost,

a bridge to foggy Halloween --

children trading chocolate bars,

stuffing their loot in a pillowcase.

Dowry of hope rattled in pockets

in musical ways --

now the nickel

is crushed by headlines

on the evening news.

Acid reflux of ash covers

the cheek of a waning moon.

First New York, then land

after land after land.

September turns the haunted month.

Apparitions are real,

real as the last letter home

from a soldier stationed in Tikrit.

Bones beneath a coffin's lid

scatter like pencils in echoing vaults --

becoming viscid roots of chaos

ruling every sidewalk's crack.

Tyrants in their busy trances

argue as the bodies fall.

We ache for a calm perch

beside a trustable stream.

A beating heart, a fist to clench.

Eleven is a jail cell of abject fear

from crawling dawn to dragging dusk.

Who wrote this atlas with these lines:

clashing, seldom parallel.

*First Published in The Pittsburgh Quarterly

Color Guards

On the tail of a going frost
come yellow sentinels of spring --
green reed stalks,
milk of youth inside a cup,
collyrium, counterpoint --
arable land now soft as veal.

*First Published in Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry

A Rose to Press

Illness smells out the trite like beagles
with noses near to the ground --
like a mother who knows
her daughter's been smoking
in the bathroom downstairs
a dozen walls away from her.
Suddenly this narrowing
of breakdown lanes, of space to roam,
sidewalks cracking from the ice.
Slippery sunsets, stretching winters,
each hour of spring fresh popcorn
to a starving duck.

Truth becomes too short to hold --
like mustache trimmings in the sink,
like bones that go brittle and snap,
like hay that meets immutable rain.
Don't we wish it didn't take
a teapot growing cold and chipped
to make us want the chamomile.
The poem is a rose to press;
the rose is a poem to read --
this might be it
for both the garden and the light.

*First Published in Lily Magazine

About Janet

Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in 2River View, Poetry Magazine.com, Offcourse, Octavo, The Pedestal Magazine, Wicked Alice, Southern Ocean Review, 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.

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

Home