When you called before a tangerine sun
rose over the knotted hill,
your voice dizzy and soft,
I sensed the seizure squeezing
lungs that were my air.
Father said: "a stroke is irreversible."
This was distant medicine in tune
with truths that scorched my tongue.
I panicked like a groping child
when lights go out too suddenly.
Watched the wand above
the shaking steering wheel
hit ninety on the country road.
You were brittle china saucers
slipping from my sweaty palms.
I drove past lilies pale as chalk
to find you in the kitchen nook,
sipping tea with half your lips.
Leaving earth with peerless grace
right up to the linen's end.


JANET BUCK is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in PoetryBay, CrossConnect, Poetry Magazine.com, Offcourse,The Pedestal Magazine, Red River Review, Megeara, Southern Ocean Review, Ariga, Facets Magazine, riverbabble, Three Candles, Verse Libre Quarterly, The Montserrat Review, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Janet's second print collection, Tickets to a Closing Play, was the winner of the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award; the book is scheduled for release in October of 2003.
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