THE LIFTED SKIRT

After your death, I stare at your bed--
robot in a stony igloo wanting
to trade the chill for warmth.
I smell your hair in pillow conch,
in feathers of abandonment
that take a fragile world by storm.
I look for oysters in a clam,
for pearls on a broken chain.
Mourning's ugly odyssey
keeps turning up the slaughtered dream.

Beneath the skirt sit tumbleweeds--
dented slippers, empty boxes,
spoons and forks and tea cups
with a lipstick mark that used
to sue a cloudy day with stripes
of sugared grenadine.
A messy maze of cords and wires
all attached to nothing much
but sockets of recurring grief.
A cactus counting water drops.

I finger webs for widows
which I know will bite
or drive me to a whiskey glass.
Run across the lint of lonely
decked in golden lion fleece.
A stethoscope through which
I hear my clawing heart,
fossils of a rose's womb
that never made it to a vase.

The waffled mattress bears your prints,
urine-stained with facts of time
no catheter of need could change.
A diaphragm for sex with fate
that didn't work, our prayers
had holes no funeral mass
or black cortege could staple shut.
Air stays fonts of stale gin--
some sterile note of punishment
for loving in the first degree.

       ####

Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry.

Her work has recently appeared in CrossConnect, Avatar Review, OffCourse, Facets, The Pedestal Magazine, Comrades, Three Candles, Stirring, Sand to Glass, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide.

In 2002, Buck's poetry is scheduled to appear in PoetryBay, Artemis, The Montserrat Review, Recursive Angel, The Carriage House Review, Southern Ocean Review, Gertrude, and The Pittsburgh Quarterly.  For links to more of her work, see:http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html

She can be reached at: jbuck22874@aol.com.