TWO POEMS
By Janet I. Buck
THE GREEK CHORUS
I was ten when I saw the Parthenon --
its regal columns in decay,
tourists streaming through like sheep.
I wondered why a camera lens
perceived the pillars as a goddess,
not a tree house needing nails.
Time was just a school bell
or pasta cooking on the stove.
To innocence and youth,
dust seemed purposeless and flat.
Grinding joints and muscles
warming up for life
made no galling noises then.
I sang no choruses of grief
and all my plagues were little ones.
I had expected a garden of flowers
with color and flawless leaves,
not some guide's old woman hands
pointing to my destiny.
I didn't know that
merely
standing through the hours
was magic as a pumping vein
that simply stops without
so much as a word or a moan.
All the postcards on the rack
showed sapphire waves
trimmed in ivory strips of lace
and tall umbrellas in the sand.
I didn't know all cities
and all skeletons grew
weak from massive burials --
all chips of land, all wafers
of a perfect eye, all birds in flight,
all children skating winter ponds,
all temporary ice and stone
met ruination and demise
in the glazed mirror
of a blue glass sea.
THE VERY LAST HOUR
You're almost 94 -- each motion
like hauling the trash to the curb,
a plight of disappearing art.
My love alone can't keep you
as a velvet rose I've pressed
into some book of need.
I grab the can and help you push
as wheels catch on cobblestones.
Autumn is shaking the trees.
Our visits grow short
as time grows tall and stalks
these chats between these storms.
Health is a donut half-eaten and dry.
Alice has a knee replaced
and Carol's voice has gone to seed
from puffing on long cigarettes.
Only croaks and moans remain.
Your arms become two
soft baguettes.
Woolly blankets decked in lint
tuck and pin you mummy style.
Illness pops all trite balloons
and we have come to question
those who walk the streets
without a purpose nested
in what hair is left.
I worry the very last
hour is near,
close as sagging skin to bone.
Your hands are ancient maps --
the presence of mortality
drops pretense like that big
thick rock that always
starts an avalanche.
We need to talk of weight and wind,
of endings on the brittle edge.
END
Note: "The Greek Chorus" previously appeared in Facets Magazine and "The Very Last Hour" in The Muse Apprentice Guild
Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in Octavo, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, CrossConnect, Scrivener's Pen, Poetry Magazine.com, The Montserrat Review, Nasty, Offcourse, The Pedestal Magazine, MiPo, PoetryBay, Tryst, The Rose & Thorn, Red River Review, Coelacanth, Facets Magazine, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Tickets to a Closing Play, her second print collection of poetry, won the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award and is available at Amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.booksurge.com, and www.givalpress.com.
**Update from May 2004**
Janet Buck's third print collection, Beckoned By The Reckoning, is now available from PoetWorks Press. The book is 118 pages in length and 25 of the poems, recorded in the author's own voice, are also available on CD. Of course, you can order either the book or CD separately. The cover illustration for this collection was done by the reknowned artist Dee Rimbaud, in Scotland. PoetWorks Press did a fantastic design and layout job.
For links to more of her work, see: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html
