Pocket Change

November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?”
T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” — 1922

As locust of grief gathers its legs
for the pounce and traffic spins
in its clotted grave,
answer escapes by channel of fog.
I am seized by the question’s thrust–
turn toward ways you fanned a purse
and opened it on Christmas Eve.
A man with his face inking a sign
marked homelessness, dotting
your “I” with a tear of having more
than your heart required in wallet clutch,
pushed you to extend your gift.
You dropped $5 in his lap.
He smiled the way a cock must crow
waking up a sleeping farm.
Teeth became a rope of pearls,
real in their soft reward.

Passersby withdrew from slug trail poverty
and the wind raced its breath
toward frost and clung.
“Pocket change, that’s all we are
and all we have, trading pennies for a dime.”
The song of it all in photograph
rekindled decades hence in water bath
for wisdom’s tiny carrot curl.
“One clash with fate, that’s all it takes,”
you murmured quietly, as if your vocal chords
had violins in lumpy throat.
That single reach. Rendering a bible’s jacket
more than paper babble bound.
Undaunted by his drunkenness and sour cough,
a memory pushes through my hands.

*First Published in The Pedestal Magazine

Assumption

November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry

It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.
Since I sat on the edge of her bed
reading “Dover Beach” aloud
for ears pressed firmly
to the final page of life.
Patches of strength
curling their corners
like bandaids over wetted skin.

And I thought I could.
Make crepes that smiled from the pan
and press her Irish linen
without the steam of tears
and tuck it out of sight.

We matched like new pairs of socks
in my underwear drawer
or widows holding hands at Sunday Mass.
I’m sure she knew I smoked
and never said a word.
But turned faux pas like broken lips
of china cups around to face the wall.
It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.

And I thought I could.
Sit on her bathroom floor alone.
Use wine to take me places I needed to go.
She had this way —
of revising defeat —
of pouring waterfalls of misery
into margarine tubs
and sending me home,
steering straight.

I still feed the daisies she left
with watered gin, and they flower
even in September’s shade.
Each book she bound with patient flesh.
Advice a gilded potpourri
sprinked like sugar
over bowls of regret.

We both agreed that bridge
was a waste of precious hours.
That poetry and shoehorns
wedged crippled toes
into the “best of times.”
It’s been two years, one month, three weeks,
four days.

And I thought I could.

*First Published in New Thought Journal

Allergies to Ivory

November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry

I understood your allergies to ivory,
anything close to white. Perhaps it was
a form to sign inside the morgue.
Vivid frost of lonely winters
after cancer shook the house,
left you only furniture
and pitch black night
without much velvet in its grain.
The livid shade of feckless hope,
of failure knocking at the door.
The color was that pat, that clean.
Death is the ultimate bleach.
The parking lot had memories
of times your shoes kicked a tire,
then returned to dust a shelf of china cups
that rattled in an avalanche.

“I’ll call you on the phone,” you said,
“but I can’t walk the ghostly halls.”
I understood the jail rails of steel beds
and gurneys that carry a world away —
then lie and do not bring it back.
That room with little on the walls but
voiding charts and memos to a passing nurse
who had no answers in her hand
but gentle ways to close the book
as raison d’être lost its glue.
I would have picked the dye myself.
Every lily told a tale
of love as poisoned manuscripts.
Anything in dirty chalk
was just too close to missing angels,
open graves, and pale moans.

*First Published in Epiphany