Potholes
I look in shards of bathroom mirrors
wishing for steam, for blankets
of forgiving fog to keep the stitches
down to tree lines hidden
from the orange sun's clairvoyant eye.
Who will love this road again --
potholes where a breast should be --
keeps gathering like minnows
in a tide pool slick.
I wish the current came and went,
took me with its ethered foam.
"You'll adjust," say mourners
of this tragedy, who stand
a step away from scars.
"It's only a mastectomy"
say women with two hills intact.
They have the furry hands of men
roaming theirs in midnight velvet
flawless drape while rainstorms
brew between their thighs.
This is the moment of drought,
doubt, and forcible rhyme.
Strength is a corset drawing its string,
but I see sorrow's flab in piles
sabotaging silhouettes of every
jet black evening gown.
Every negligée in drawers
is just a snake and touch is fangs.
Glad to be alive and all,
its tattered bible on the bed,
there among the finite ruins.
"Can I borrow a dress for the wake?"
you ask, as silence beats its hollow drum.
What piece of art has slipped
from hard, familiar walls.
I hesitate to parse an answer
from your lips. Their cracking plates
I recognize, taste the thirty miles away.
And so we speak of color shades
that blend with mats of graying hair
when we are merely breaking cups.
That bitter bend in question marks
smacks the air alive again
with the salt of a hovering sea.
"Let's have lunch before we die ..."
yanks me from my paper duties,
piercing all the trivia
of folding sheets and stamping words
as if they can halt the tick
of a clock, foot race sunlight
damming floods of twilight winning acreage.
My puppy slams the keyboard shut,
hungry for a scrap of food
I'm hoarding 'til it's suppertime.
Her furry paws too packed with sense --
as if to say, "Crack the egg before it rots."
Blades part snow and suddenly
the slick of glass seems meaningless
without a touch to lift the ice.
As we listen for endings,
the middle grows pregnant with gifts.
The ground and a step strike us both
as slabs of warm toast under the tooth
crowned only by minutes of luck.
The body cage -- a leotard.
All drawers closing on the thumb.
Planning What's Left of the Pink
Our faces begin to look like a beach
beaten by sun, lifting and slipping
to pulses of tide.
Cuneiform letters blending
with grains of the sand.
Someday, I say, we'll form a word.
Our strolls resemble ravaged wood,
full of the ants of a ghost.
Treat me like a stranded whale
that needs a crew of volunteers
to keep its thumping heart alive.
Too late is rubbing against the now --
tight shoes on the reds of blistered heels.
Flesh is wilting as we speak (or don't).
Shriveled roses in the yard prove my point
as seasons hand a leaf and branch
to ice and proper burial.
I pick the ones still hinting
at a shade of pink.
Magnets of my laden verse
falling off old ice box doors
I've smeared with candor's travesty.
Stab the silence; talk to me.
I could be gauze for the blood.
I could find rivers under the scar.
The question curl (the orange carrot)
in my palm, is whether or not I'll ever hear
"I love you" horned from mountain tops.
Can't you tell -- since Mother died --
you have to speak for both your tongues.
I'd settle for a simple touch
you treat like corpses of a rat
abandoned on the basement stairs.
The color of death showed in your smile.
Molars sat like licorice gumdrops
finalizing carnivals.
You were ready and prepared --
watered roses open to a streak of sun.
Tethers of my pressing love
would hold you back, make you strain.
Each breath, another river dried.
No more muscles on the map --
I was grabbing for a prayer,
squeezing at the going fruit,
threading it like worms
on hooks of fishing poles.
You needed the sea.
I needed the pier of a little white lie.
The end was calling your name --
hurling out each syllable
like sex pulls dogs in heat to fences,
through the mire, under wood --
some strong instinct
tied to puzzles tied to time.
This suffocating leaving stuff
dominated everything.
The hospice nurse just shook her head
as I kept reaching for your youth --
rolling bricks of rosaries
as if their strings would outlast fate.
I shivered in the crux of chill --
hated all this "weighing in"
you called the open mouth of mortal
stepping through a closing door.
Gone gray from lashings of rain.
Still art in the rickety sense,
proud of its age, its old cocoon.
Paint or lens should seize
your hunchbacked frame,
but cars drive by in steady streams.
All eyes locked on obligation's
granite road, center stripes
that too will fade like bars of soap.
Beams, these beads of mercury,
register the heat and fall --
a thousand seasons passing through.
Swell in summer. Shrink in ice.
Climates turn your wood to claws.
Bales of hay are stacked like dice.
Dirt for floors is all we own.
You are the ribs caging
the fist of a heart bleeding
and continuing no matter what
the heavens bring.
A pitch fork rests against a rail.
On all three prongs a story sits.
A tale of scabs and scars of earth.
The sun, a pink flamingo wing,
rises, sets around this sketch.
An old ballet of wishful bones
bending in wind toward snap.
Flesh like ours. Beaten, sagging.
The beauty of rotting with grace.
Shingles of a thousand toenails
bragging of the grief they waltzed.
--Janet I. Buck