Issue 5:
Wood
Janet I. Buck
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Music-less Chairs
You lay in stone
beneath a drape of ethered clouds.
We waited an eternity,
sorting through those love clichés.
Air was like a surgeon's mask;
it held that brand of nervousness.
The stagnant room had
rows of chairs--all music-less.
I tried them out, one by one.
My bones were candles
resting snuffed and so I paced
the way my father must have done
when Mother died the same damned death.
At 88, you claimed the Cancer was a fact,
that tumors were just warts that wiggle
in a sea of higher powers than bodies have.
Didn't want the knives and scalpels
digging at your sense of peace.
"Leave the wrinkles where they are.
In shrinking youth, you're sitting
on piano keys--doves that trust a thin,
bare twig of winter to return to spring.
Aging comes with sharps and flats,
violas full of sagging strings."
I pushed that gurney down the hall
with grinding pistons of my greed.
You couldn't hear. You couldn't see.
You couldn't stand. Still you stayed.
I look in mirrored retrospect
and see my need--the way
I stretched done bubble gum
to quell a set of nervous teeth.
My innocence, unintended insulation
ruling with an iron fist,
its callus sat above your blood.
Pain and time would file it down--
sense of blackness hovering.
~Janet I. Buck
Janet teaches writing and literature at the college level. Her poetry appears in hundreds of publications online and in print. Visit her website for information on her new CD, books, readings, and appearances. Email.
© 2000 by Janet I. Buck. All Rights Reserved.
© 2000-2002 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.
This page updated April 23, 2002.