It was all bricked up, but I had to look.
Under the hat of the porch
where the swing caved into the rust.
I pulled each stone,
light as hair on nervous skin.
Winced and teared but knew
some score was waiting there --
harps a thumb refused to touch.
A paintbrush like a horse's tail
that swiped at flies you couldn't change.
60,00 lemon rinds.
Moot remains of destiny.

Your fingers were making lemonade.
Time, like sugar, dissolved.
A comb for days when heads weren't bald.
A doll minus her right leg,
severed just above the knee.
Were you testing your smile
when doctors said I'd lose my own
to see if curves could ever aim at suns again?
83 beer caps, scattered like unwanted dimes.
One for every casket filled.
The willow trees were weeping too.

Fishing line, just skeins of it,
you used to wile away the hours.
A single earring minus post.
Nibbled off? Lost in floods of lust saliva
some late night of loneliness.
A dozen bibles, pages torn.
You ditched them all --
their fancy, sculptured promises,
their thick commandments
stained with sweat --
when Gramma slid into her grave
on skates of useless rosaries.
Their parchment flesh, their turtle doves,
brittle now like bark and twigs
that bitch inside a roaring fire.

An Amaryllis in the Dark

I know you said, "I won't again."
Fall prey to skunks
and steel whiskers on my neck.
"I've learned to spot a porcupine."
Your diary is bursting
with the warning bells --
bottles rolling under seats,
fights about the last spent dollar
sitting on a bar stool slab.
Tick tock, tick tock,
love before the clock just quits.
Trust might not smear
this time around --
wet polish on your fingernails.

Here he is.
Smothered in Stetson cologne,
nibbling at shoals of flesh
you meant to seal and stash away
with paraffin of wiser nights.
His wink, another lightening bolt
and you recall the tree that split.
Footprints of cherish hunger for shoes.
He could be aphids like the rest.
He could be the apple without the worm.
What if you die of rumblings.

With his hand in the small of your back,
like batter on hot griddle beds,
an amaryllis in the dark
might bust the boarded closet door.
You might try on a negligee,
drop your guard, sniff the rose.
I've been that sack;
I've watched those wings,
the sooty ones, rinsed
by water meeting drought,
licking themselves like wanted cats.
This butterfly bag is ready to break.
Sometimes the wind is kind.

Some Syllables Require Beer

Your grave is a tumor that grows,
defying the scalpel of rhyme.
Its jacquard spinning absent thread.
I have no clothing of our past.
No cuffs in closets, lingerie,
no sweaters I could sniff like dogs.
No diaries, no photographs,
no Norman Rockwell's,
just the reprint of the void.
Strings of catholic rosaries became a stone.
Quick to fall. Slow to roll.
Father paid the weavers off,
told them all to find a job
where dreams and rugs
weren't tripping things.

Those last long days before
black widows crawled the walls:
"It's time to discuss my plot,"
you say, standing at the bathroom mirror
as tresses tumble in the sink,
lost batting from a treasured quilt.
Clumps become a hill so fast,
by proxy clot his lonely pores,
carpet bomb the earth he knows.
Stallions of bought medicine
become a wounded horse to shoot.
It's been so close to fifty years.
He has to be drunk to say your name.

Even then his raspy throat
is just the slums of ragged grief.
Eyes wear bars like city windows
privy to the rising crime.
Our fortune cookies
have no paper in their shells.
I have no maps to teach me
where our rivers were.
No Monet's. Just sharp Gaugin's.
Chins so shaved they could be scars --
pointed where the music ceased.

All Poetry by Janet Buck