The Death Watch by Janet Buck

Featured Writer: Janet Buck

The Death Watch

Staring at finality.
Its rash at home in confines of an ICU.
Quiet clouds of white gray paint
mixing with the cardboard air.
The station's desk seems just a subway
full of papers piled high in helplessness.
Nurses slip from room to room,
from bed to bed, as if the hands
of ticking clock are running them
through circles of a paragon
they recognize as forms of gods asleep,
snoring through this agony,
when suns should push those
cold potato moons away with silver forks
of noble gesture rusting in this universe.
Their fingers are assigned the doom,
diaper change of grief and sorrow
clinging to a cotton day.
Pinning down hot metal tears.
Rubber gloves become routine.
Rolled on thumbs like condoms over
penises in rapes of human dignity.
Staring at finality.
Rather quite the opposite.
It stares at us, sucks
the marrow from crumbled bone.
Here we have the march of self-less
starching every uniform.
Something of a person's soul
blowing sand in fragile eyes
of Faberge's on route
to some museum grave.
Determined love can intervene,
breathing hurled back and forth
like scuba divers pass the last of oxygen
in tanks imbued with fatal holes.

Beauty Marks

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct
and the brain can conceive beyond .... When we love a woman,
we don’t start measuring her limbs.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

So why am I measuring mine?
Or rather their absence like
rubbled remains of infamous war.
As Goncourt says,
"Beauty is what untrained eyes
consider abominable."
So the shape of this truth,
empty water pipes of slacks,
blood ketchup on a pillowcase
of wrinkled health,
this stump among these
stately trees, should be
the grandest part of me.

Its boxing glove, in rings
of sweet mortality
fighting for the simple stand
as robbers holding up a bank,
lies coveted in canvas clothes,
silk negligees in upper drawers
of other women's diaries.
I stir the soup of self with tongue.
Seconds tick, the cool is slow.
Cognizant of burn and broth.
You talk me out of shame with touch.
Each raw caress, a peeled carrot,
orange color coming forth.
Its sting a bee that's lived its life,
decaying on the window sill.

The Woodpecker

Wrinkled quilts beneath your eyes
remind me where a warmth once lay.
I see your hands at bedside
after surgery, combing my hair
in tender tugs as if you’re brushing
balding spots around the corner
from our smiles.
I slip my fingers through the rails,
roped and saddled by IVs.
A blood bag just above my head,
watching crimson dripping down,
petals into painful graves.
You confuse me.
Some days, the mug is full of soup,
soft celery and yellow corn,
and noodles tearing in the heat.
Some days stocked with Chardonnay.
Others just flat emptiness
like skirts of kites wrapped
for gifts but never strung
against the wind.
I never know what fill to trust.
Is all my dizzy busyness
at birthday time a woodpecker
hammering granite glass?
Am I walking miles and miles
to lead you down retreating beach,
where I’ll be left and you’ll be
swimming in your pills?
Climbing steps for evergreens,
discovering a plastic tree.
We might have been such sculpted love,
a mother/daughter piece of art.
We are sand that should be clay.
Ground poison blowing at our feet.

Janet Buck, Ph.D. is the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in CrossConnect, Zang Spur Review, Pif Magazine, The Dakota House Journal, The Melic Review, Stirring, Countless Horizons, Ascent, Tapestry, The Rose & Thorn, Avatar Review, pith, Perihelion, In Motion, OffCourse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In the year 2000, Janet was of ten U.S. poets to be featured at the "One Heart, One World" Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City. Her poem "Acrylic Thighs" was translated into five languages and paired with original artwork. The tour traveled to France, Australia, Vietnam, Brazil, and Japan. In 2001-2002, Buck's poetry is scheduled to appear in PoetryBay, The Montserrat Review, Runes, The Pedestal Magazine, Concrete Wolf, The Carriage House Review, Swagazine, PoetryRepairShop, Slow Trains, Verse Libre Quarterly, Wicked Alice, Facets, Southern Ocean Review, Artemis, The American Muse, and The Pittsburgh Quarterly. Recent awards include The H.G. Wells Award for Literary Excellence, First Place in Kimera's Poetry Contest 2001, Editor's Choice Award for Sol Magazine, and the 2001 Kota Press Anthology Prize. In 2001, Janet's poem "The Teapoy" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Pedestal Magazine. Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, Red River, Pierian Springs, Stirring, PoetryBay, Offcourse, Ascent, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In 2002-2003 Buck's poetry is scheduled to appear in Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Gin Bender, Artemis, The Montserrat Review, Recursive Angel, The Foliate Oak, Southern Ocean Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Coelacanth, Cordite, CrossConnect, and The Oklahoma Review.

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