Putting a Garden to Sleep
A lousy satin comforter
I bought to lay upon your bed -
cheer up walls of closing plays.
Corn husk arms lay silently
in pockets of the dirty sheets.
Tulips of your eyes would shut
in deference to winter’s plague.
Your mind was a garden
aching for sleep.
I tried to keep it up all night.
Read you scraps of poetry
like tributes on some Pharaoh’s grave.
“You’ve got those accents wrong again.”
We laughed out loud like clean sorbet
between a meal of sauerkraut
and whipping cream.
Thumbtacks of our memories
were losing heads; I pounded in
the sharp remains with bleeding
fingers of hammered grief.
Paced the Louvre of pictured halls,
madly chasing renaissance.
Conversing was a one-way tunnel -
cobwebs of a morphine drip.
My father said you needed it
to make the ending easier.
“Easier for whom?” I asked
with melancholy quantum leaps.
The second day was turtle slow.
Your flesh a bruised mosaic now
staring up at choir pews.
Janet Buck's poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in A Writer's Choice, The Melic Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, Born Magazine, Poetry Life & Times, Big Bridge, and hundreds of journals world-wide. Two of her poems have been nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize in Poetry and she is a recent recipient of The H.G. Wells Award for Literary Excellence. In December 1999, Newton's Baby Press released her first print collection of poetry entitled Calamity's Quilt. Janet is one 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 in April, 2000. In September 2000, she will be on a reading tour in the Seattle Area, including a feature at The Hugo House and Barnes & Noble. She is currently on the editing and review panel for the up-coming book: Chicken Soup for the Volunteer's Soul. To read more of Janet's work or schedule a reading, go to http://www.janetbuck.com.
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