Sonnets in a Land of Prose

"Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death."
Francis Picabia (1878-1953)

Christmas lights have decked your house
for eighteen months
as if you're hanging cherry pits
of a futile wish, plastic
sprigs of neon green
to drown the immutable dark.
His truck still sits on vulva ruts --
mosaic mud -- an albatross
in sprawling jungles of yellow grass.
Death and love are always
messy taffy pulls.
Everywhere your fingers reach,
some brand of thanatopsis lives.
His garden tools all vices of a memory.
If graves are just a dry tureen,
why do they adhere like tar,
turn forward into festered wounds?

You save his voice on mini-tapes.
Listen to its orchestra
for sanding down the silences.
Use it like a sleeping pill
when clocks become a ticking bomb.
His pipe still packed with fragrances
you hated then and now embrace.
His baseball hat is nesting birds
in cradles of a fallen oak.
Every time I bring the mail,
your housecoat wears the painted tear,
its canvas tired and shrinking
as the grief grows tall.
You read his name like sonnets
in a land of prose.
His Lazy-Boy just looks at you --
a boulder in a hollow cave.

 

This Old Chair

We divided your stuff
on the tail of black limos
creeping the ragged streets.
My sister took the pretty towels --
the ones that said:
"Don't touch, I stain;
      Don't fold, I tear.
            Don't use, I bite."

All that was left
was the lump of a chair
that cradled the crumbling straw.
From here, you argued with walls,
with a god you couldn't see
but chose to trust no differently
than ducks fly south
imbued with promises of warmth.
An afghan draped across the back
to cover holes your spine had rubbed.

From here, you flipped like a caught trout
in the moon's gray pail.
Watched as the rainfall bled
on fuzzy portraits of glass.
Listened as the furnace chirped
its bird-like morning arias.
From here, you grabbed an apron string
as love would jet from room to room.
Lit your pipe, gushed about her homemade pies.
Marked her lips with syrup spittle,
afterglow of Sunday waffles on the porch.

This old thing Grandma called
a wart on nice, an albatross of tackiness,
a dog to shoot, a rock to lift --
but never moved and dusted
like a precious mink
in closets of the very rich.
Dimes between the cushion cracks.
Songs of sweat on beaten arms.
I had to keep this monument.
All your craters, all your perils,
all your Hells had settled here.

 

Dried Fruit

Each hour here, a fading ballerina turns.
Her tights, their fabric chipping paint.
Silence seems magnanimous.
Empty beds are haunting facts.
They mean a hearse has come and left
between the midnight shift and dawn.
A sheet change is a magic trick
that rolls a body inches
from the yawning grave.
Each breath a bruising apricot --
a pinkish lung pulling from the inner seed.
This is the home of the used.
Wheels spin, their thread-less
bobbins sewing something,
going somewhere in mirage.
Blank faces are puzzles of cracking nuts
no one wants to bother with.

Plumish dream and drying fruit.
This is the home of the used.
Eyes like acorns someone missed
when rakes addressed the palms of oak.
Your eyes slam shut
and I can hear their hinges creak
like shelters in a hurricane.
You take me by the rattled arm
through gauntlets of past.
Hands, once birds, now feathers
on molasses jars.
Visitors present their guilt,
blinding mirrors of easy youth
in the shape of a potted plant --
here in the place where lasting
the night is a sun in itself.
This is the home of the used.
Where aching goes to finish portraits of a life
some daughter doesn't want to hang.

[END]

© Janet Buck 2002