Ariga: Poetry: Janet Buck: Islands in the Deep

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Islands in the Deep
By Janet I. Buck

4 a.m. alone.
Among balloons and mounding hours
and sheets of brittle innocence.
The sun descending when
it should have risen through
the bonnet clouds of nurses’ caps
that foam and drool as
puppies left alone to die.
Her thirsty tongue an island
waves of knowing couldn’t reach.

Seven years of youth
and putting Barbie’s perfect foot
in folds of hungry mouth.
Sucking frigid air from plastic tubs
of toes and promises that
when she went to school again
she’d wear a Barbie leg
that knew the steps and shapes
of Cinderella’s painted smile.

Needles sticking out from palms
that pity so the gilded locks of
fairy tales and crystal dreams
of jungle gyms and roller-skates
that haven’t yet collapsed
in shadows cast by
passing trains of fate.

Her father missing
from this ward of doom.
His heavy heart inhaled
by knowing well that
dollar signs and chanting rage
shall always fail to buy
the even gait of grace.
They mark the limb to cut
in felted ink of permanence
and fluff the pillows soaked
by gently flooding eyes.
The stairs of years ahead in piles
like bricks of pyramids that
tourists see and save
but never really grasp.

Amadeus You started tall and dark.
Your shadow dancing in the night.
A syllable of need or two,
just worms upon a fishing pole.
The slither turned so silently
as butter in a microwave.
All at once the melt was there.
I really wanted out.

The guards of guilt
like sentries at a prison wall.
Their eyes a chunk of frozen corn
that lost its sweet but saved
the yellow, rubbed it in.
And so I always stayed.

Your presence in the morning light.
Minus music. Full of wine.
Arms and legs that might have moved
but lay like crusted cresent rolls
that apathy had dried as wheat
in parchment skies above
the growing mounds of bills.

All the moods and lipless smiles
you made me hop around.
The yanking sound of stolen love.
Tires screeching, bleeding air.
And never giving back.

“Enough” was salt that dried
with tears on countertops.
And when I left, I squeezed the tube
of all our dreams in toothpaste
running down the drain.

The slivers of your bitter words
I scraped like putty stoning up
around the lips of china cups.
I couldn’t save the chips of heart.
I buried what remained.

Janet Buck teaches writing and literature at the college level and has published over ninety poems in a variety of journals, magazines and anthologies across the United States. Two of her poems, “The Nursing Home” and “The Arietta,” have won second place awards in the National Library of Poetry’s contests in 1996 and 1997. You can write to her care of jbuck@22874@aol.com

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