Fond Pastiche

As facts go, it was an odd strain:
child-less breeding motherly-love.
One would think that an empty womb,
a slit balloon of womanhood,
would yield despairing desert sands--
that vacancy’s burn would build a fence.
But ways you gave reversed clichés,
dropped parachutes where eyes expected 
envy’s shrapnel, acid leaks of estrogen.
When Mother died, you wore her slippers, 
held me as a well must do
with floating candles in its throat.
Listened like a forest does
when saws and plows invade its soil.

Our bathtub scenes remind me of emotive bliss 
unwritten in most family scripts:
I helped you to the cast iron tub,
got the water steaming hot.
Tossed in Mr. Bubble grains
and added oil of lavender.
There I sat. My bottom on the toilet seat--
both feet on the countertop, 
eating donuts I’d bought for you, 
casting crumbs at your Persian kitten 
jealous of our intimacy. 

I dried your back and helped you out,
put coffee in your sugar cup so Father 
would think you were eating healthy, 
following the doctors’ rules.
“Interesting men,” you always said,
“are the bricks of sanity’s hearth.
Kiss your husband on the lips,
but pick him for his head.”
Wisdom laughed but left its mark,
like a paintbrush stains an empty canvas, 
its fumes diluted by falling rain.
Every tear I dropped in oceans,
your patience went deep sea fishing for.
You brushed off trouble in my life
like aphids from a yawning rose.

by Janet I. Buck

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The Botticelli Bottlebrush

There are secrets of the universe to be learned from people who have nothing. 
I've lived with them and it's dirty and smelly, but very rich.

Mitch Longley

Age five. Long face.
Its leather almost husks of corn.
She sat on floors I'd memorized.
I wanted so to shorten them.
Looking up at rows of legs 
from margins of a missing one. 
Aware health's fortune is a myth
where wise is just fermented pain.
Her plastic leg in seams of shame--
I knew them better than my skin. 
A lobster trapped in tanks of eyes
shelling time and growing up 
in very unexpected ways.

Socratic oaths of oafish steps that 
buy their way up flights of stairs. 
Languid sense in cotton balls 
beneath bright lies she'd learn to use--
paper tape on bandages--
sirens on an ambulance
ward off demons hauling grief.
I wanted to share cool hiccups 
of forests I'd learned to part.
Separate like whites and darks 
with licenses of feeble words.
Its pillow was a rusted tractor
bringing in a stack of hay.
To tell her--bones of Brillo Pads
could not escape a grimy sink.

There are no clouds of cashmere tears,
but candor's whisk works better 
than denial's sweep with eyelash 
brooms that blink at dust and miss
thick waves of scenery.

Tapioca trouble time that grew 
dessert from feeble rice.
A Botticelli bottlebrush
that finds a way to carve its shape
in seaweed threads of absent art.

by Janet I. Buck

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Letters to & from a Grave