Janet Buck

SONNETS IN THE 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.

Date of Birth: 8/9/55 Location: Medford, Oregon Email: jbuck22984@aol.com Website: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html Publications: The Pedestal Magazine, The American Muse, Three Candles, Southen Ocean Review, CrossConnect, OffCourse, Runes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Recursive Angel, Poetry Magazine.com , Stirring V4:E1, V2:E5, V2:E2, V1:E2 Books/CDs: Calamity's Quilt, Reefs We Live, Before the Rose, Ash Tatoos Awards: Kimera's Poetry Contest 2001, The Thunder Rain Award 2001, Kota Press Anthology Prize

- March 2002 - Dear Anna Sonnets in a Land of Prose Calling The Minnows Oxford Blue Ficus Aurea Playing it Back what we will plant unto the breech some more Ars Poetica Elegy For My Mother Standing Under a Street Lamp on the Corner of Brice Court Escaping the terrible fish Sadie song for stephanie it will always be the season of famine somewhere Adieu - John Turner's Best Of - the disgruntled women's chorus sings accompaniment on the beta male blues How to Build an Impossible Staircase Trying to Raise the Dead How to Kiss The Grassfires of the Resistance Rishikesh