A Brittle Heart
“Oh man. Another plastic day
on the calendar to celebrate.
Who will remember
the gifts I’ve given my sons?
A sanctuary for their minds,
all those dinners, all those clothes.
Trips across expensive oceans.
Cookie dough and candy canes.
Blood bags of my sleepless nights
should be returned on holidays.
Bitterness is unbecoming, still I ache
in ghostly forms I can’t erase.
I yearn for reciprocity and wonder
what I did so wrong to raise four boys
forgetting their mother on Mother’s Day.
Drooping roses minus aqua
aren’t the settings I had planned.”
She shreds the ads in stacks of mail,
plowing through mines of meted justice,
teaching her of selfishness
she pasted on a freeway sign
like bubble gum of leveled bugs
when booze and drugs drove everything.
Behind donned curtains,
sunglass shades, a bird-less nest
tears up like a waterfall.
A spineless kingdom, shining excess,
wasting all the matter cliques.
Dreaming of a different climate
sporting suns in lieu of clouds.
Baskets of a brittle heart in monied hay
filled with rotted Easter eggs.
Broken bracelets of her sorrow
wishing back the links removed--
clinking against a slivered glass
her daughter fills with Chardonnay.
by Janet I. Buck
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Broken Links
Devotion’s been a broken bracelet
all these years: it’s hard to put your pain aside
and move your mother close to you.
Her geriatric infancy rekindles winds
of crazy ways you’ve played the mom
when dragons of dismissal’s tongue
shooed crimson fire of busy shrews.
She sits on death row in a home
with plastic doormats for her feet,
the ones she’s left in atrophy,
growing weak like freshly
planted Christmas trees bending stalks
in tantrums of a hurricane.
I want her to gather her goddamned wits,
start a life that covets all you’d do for her--
if only she showed some graciousness,
thanked you for the clothes you brought,
denying all the selfish places money
might have gone that night.
You’d spread the wealth of love you have
like flannel petals of a rose
tracing a path for kings and queens.
She’s languishing in rolling chairs
and could be standing on her own.
Her impotence, a burning spoon
undoing triumphs of your life,
which saw the coins of slivered moons
and chose the sun in lieu of clouds.
You want to spit back all your strength,
raise her from the living dead.
I have a frail fear for you.
There are no magic tricks this time;
flesh is like a sucker spent
by way way too much wallowing.
If she were you, the links in bracelets
of her days would not be severed entities.
But she isn’t you and you aren’t she.
Your reaches for that miracle might
hand you things you’ve never had.
The other side now shows it face.
A chimera that’s lurking here--effort’s busy
slot machine could spew out piles of dirty dimes--
could be a diamond wishing well
that’s drowning in the quickened sand.
Cherish is a messy carpet
full of pungent memories.
Maybe you can freshen it; maybe not.
I sense the mode of vacillation--
monkeys swinging from a vine
above a swamp you did not dig.
Possibles become a fever--
sweaty poems a wrought intrusion--
raising numbers up a notch.
by Janet I. Buck
`````````````````````````````````````````
Faxes of a Grinding Heart
Begging at applauding thrones,
always infant infinitesimal
with decimals of hope in place.
A frown subtracts. A smile adds.
I buy you a shirt you already have--
pray its color pleases you.
I’ve tugged on coats of growing up.
Swallowed boats of agony
as if their decks might sink the sea.
Faced long strings of surgeries as if their sharps
were nothing but a tiny needle
coming from old sewing kits.
I’ve followed you like hooks do worms
assuming the great big bass of right is
in the water, swimming somewhere very close.
Every gesture meant to please like prostitutes
outside motels--approval’s dizzy
Ferris wheel in crazy unrewarded rides.
Determination’s bubbled flat
is sitting there beside the road:
in framed diplomas on the wall,
in crepes from scratch, in cookie dough,
in white corn on a dinner plate.
Awaiting the thumb of spoken love
your fingers just aren’t ready for.
I bring you gimmicks of poetry
and homemade cards--faxes of a grinding heart.
Backwash of a summer pond that blisters as
the sun is rising promising to burn off clouds.
Emotion’s tendrils, soft pink jasmine jellyfish.
A scent I crave but do not know
in leaves of crumbled potpourri.
Waiting time a stretching canyon
looking for a swinging bridge.
I’m three years old again, then four.
A child asleep in rumpled parkas of my words:
cuffs snapped shut, zipper closed,
hood attached, sleeping lightly in case it snows.
by Janet I. Buck
