David Jackson

Unbending Time

Last night
I saw what the Future was like
If Time bent
And let me slink
Into its folds.

I saw a man
Intransigent
Glacial
Glowering at me.
This iciness seeped

Into my bones.
This indifference to my pain.
He had taken me
To bandage a wound.
To provide comfort.

But my sacrifice
Lacked sincerity
And I heaved up
Words of perdition
As my soul

Slumped into submission.
I woke up
Smeared with the Present.
Drenched with sweat.
And grateful for the lineality

And irreversibility
Of Time.

It’s
It’s some biochemical calculus I’m stuck with.
Some squamous stoichiometry embedded in my brain.
This minefield I wade through.
This minerological colossus I pay obeissance to each day.

It’s there, lodged sinisterly somewhere I can’t see:
Inaccessible
Incalculable
Incandescent
Free

Asylum from Ash

“Tranquility is the old man”s milk.”

Thomas Jefferson

Dizzy for that nutrient, we load the car.
The whole world is a pair of jeans
in need of a needle and patch.
We boomerang for mint green hills
no differently than heads
with migraines duck the light.
I doubted red geraniums this icy spring
since nothing glows brighter than war.
Doubted they’d rise through carapace soil,
react and grow to warm syringes of rain.

In the navel of drought,
blue bowls of water promise us
asylum from the cloying ash.
It’s quiet here,
except for the chattering birds
discussing the size of a seed.
Bears with noses in a cooler
eating someone’s morning eggs.
Rowboats slice a shadow’s dress.
After the wool, finger the silk.

A few loose thunder clots abide
like moccasins that pad a trail.
Moons these days —
bright silver shillings
plow through smoke.
I doze at peace, under a tree,
awaken to sights of a deer,
its hooves so close I mistake them
for pairs of brand new shoes.

by Janet I. Buck

Labyrinth

This seemed a place where
the dead and the living met
for a fraction of hovering time.
Cobwebs added eerie light —
gauze above amorphous sore.
Casablanca storms were new.
No foiled loves had soiled the rain.
All our props and costumes fit.
Weeping and all facts of grief
lay ahead of open eyes
without large sacks
weighted by the coming stone.
At that presumptuous age,
we were sure that a shoe
would lead to a foot.
A hat would uncover a head with hair.
We still believed in movie screens,
in metatags of heroines.
Suns knew nothing of eclipse.

Down the creaking basement stairs
sat nests of fragile Fabergés
existing for expectant crack.
Dusty treasures, dresser drawers,
someone’s musty voyages.
Give us boxes; we made shapes.
Never thought of mushy bottoms
giving in to lifting seasons from the land.
Each breath we took, each step we made,
a scoop across a stallion’s back
racing for the river’s edge.
Later we would wake like cats
that spent their lives in search of milk —
groping for the backspace key.
Death was such a distant game —
looking didn’t scorch our hands.
Even funereal black
was just a color of paint.

by Janet I. Buck

Empty Gloves

Father bought you a house
as a little white lie —
a promise that voices of hope
were louder than labels on slides
that tossed you in the cancer wing,
made his eyes report those tears
then file them under guarded strength.
Muscles pressed against
your exit hovering
until the pen just tore the check.
These walls went from a glove
to five little pockets
minus five fingers that moved.
Your death did this.
The sofa, in its albatross of memory,
became an untouchable ruin.
The mattress a slab of lukewarm coal,
a scrapbook to slam, haul to the curb
in the velvet of midnight rain.

Lyrics peck at art once there,
but he brushes the meal away.
When I ask about your shape,
he plays down long piano hands.
Plays down crickets of your laugh.
Your grave cut out his tongue.
Your leaving scorched a knuckle’s curve —
the veins of which another woman
couldn’t bring back to rivers they were.
When pupils try not to talk,
they jitterbug around a lawn
like scattered seeds.
I can only imagine the green and the lush —
amour of such a caliber
it works like silencers for guns.
This is the score of a wish with holes.
Scars you left are made of stone.

by Janet I. Buck