Lynn Strongin

IVORY TABLATURES OF AN AUGUST AFTERNOON

MUSIC
FROM THE TRENCHES             & from those high benches of the organ loft
Beyond the arsenal of war: from
Pipe-branches or the organ
Comes the music:
One wing shaft
Cycling            cycling       a wheelchair along the sand
A halo UNPLUGGED
Pinions tilting:
Here comes greatest
Up from the core, hidden manuscripts, pearl-colored bone handle of letter-opener slicer she took 
               into the war there with her.
Inexplicable:
I climb, unforgiven, upward thru the air here
In another country
My papers—
Eggshell, & on bond, the few love letters I brought form the other land the homeland:
blue circles marking dates
Like homing pigeons
Carrying faithful, a heart a coded message.
Bletchley
Exeter
the least of things
Grasslands
Only one Joshua tree.
Each  cell in the blood
Each hum the swarm of bees
Resonated with            those who
Made
Plantations of honey
The Orchardist who picks the pears between snow
The feline who follows him
In Unespaliered trees
Any bird or angel could hide but not calm me down now:
Walking on the earthly side again                        expelled from heaven.



THE EXILIC MODE
 
Yes I am slowing down thinking literature can still be a great art:
Am fleeing with poems under a layer of metal in my suitcase
As Osip did in a frypan:
Under layers of tears
Like the Russian European Jew I am
Green eyes & all.
Down to Odessa’s Black sea:
Where there will be, alone with me, sea birds and beating hearts of my ancestors.
 
We have struggled to make this home:
Bought a radiator substitute                        put snakes of cloth in windows
Still glass rattles            floors creak year-round.
In love
I am fresh as the schoolboy on the first day of school:
Liked to disappearing
Pencils sharpened
Winter is coming
Bluntness turn to poignancy:
Every nerve in my thin body including the last nerve is being jumped on:
Talent creativity staring me down my teal eyes
Exiled
Condemned with the savagery of love
To dwell like the widow in the lighthouse: over the Black Sea.

 
 
OUR SKINNY PIPES in Tonkin House above the library bang: windows, single glazed stick, floors buckle 
               like waves of the ocean.
The house was physically lifted
Over one hundred years old. It’s a hard roll in my wheelchair.
Who am I? I ask these pearly winter noons.
I was not allowed to light a candle in the dark house after you had died.
It was inconceivable that you were there no longer:
There stood the miniature stove with three burners, two large in back, one small in front. Oven door that opened.
No AGA stove but a gem. Sky Jute, Hemp, Teal: recurring images in the slot machine of the ancient movie projector 
               in Norway House. But Back to the stove: winter afternoon an ivory tablature:
Beside it a wood, walnut blond, rocking chair yes blond like me
And with lilac eyes like you  mauve-brown:
Stone behind the miniature fireplace whose coals glowed scarlet with a 3e battery.
It is all gone fast as a boy swallows a plum
Leaving dark purple on his lips
Will I leave an inky shadow on the dark page of night, you can smell the tree behind the vellum:
The way the colts, the foals
Leave their impress in ivory?
It was a pearly wintry day:
The leonine hills white:
Bright lightbulb white          a marquee on bleak black night.
A candle is not an unsheathed bayonet
But one burns none in the library loft where we lived lofted
Into our forty-fifth year.
The wedding bands are golden, one from Georg Jensen’s in New York, contemporary Scandinavian
One ancient as the part I played when first we met, your grandmother’s gold with five diamonds I call five Puritans crossing the seas.
Two young women smoking Sobranie Black Russians on the tip of Long Island, after that Europe: entering a Boston marriage 
               with the care one would dip one toe in the frosty eaters of the Bering sea, piercing tea:
Which is, you tell me, the color of my eyes.



ONE TABLATURE IS IVORY one bone
My heart beats within
A bell ringing.
Crutch tip on sand                  alongside a sandcastle
Crenelated.
So we crenelate our fears, my sister & I am able like her to go walking.
Half a year incarcerated
I can now draw circles for those windows
Medievally        
Wanting to unlace my bodice
Vest embroidered with all plus the unicorn
Single ivory horn piercing late morning.
Afternoon is a sheet of breathing oxygen
Till our lungs hurt with the effort of forward-thrust.
Go for a perfect three-point landing
Slow reverse thrust:
This is me, I , a girlchild backward falling         but laughing since on granules like pearls 
               like silk.
There is no one of our ilk in the meadows here
The woman in wheelchair from the other side of the ocean
Spiked hair, the Statue of Liberty, hairdo, purple nail polish
Wears gloves to protect her hands from the silver:
Nonetheless the stigmata bleed from her hands:
She understands
So nods her head:
a watchdog her mother stands in the corner, “I am old my dog is old”
tears fall hot as iron.
 


DOG-EARED VELLUM love-letters written in water float away
The attic is only partially cleaned: But
The dog of life patiently waiting, thirsting
A golden lab for service who only answers to his name:
A radiologist once she treated children, infanticide of her own child multiple sclerosis came
Tore into her nervous system
“rots not only the body but the mind”
a bitter smirk:
she resembles a Renaissance archangel.
I look down
Each silver-wheeled
Proud, ashamed
A sham to smile
So run side by side circles casting interlocking circles on sand
Grouse are meant to ripen in Siberia:
Here
‘s a fag, do you have  light?
It spins blue haloes in the hard-packed crystalline snow.
This is not the film, Zhivago, being shot:
This is the real thing
Your fingers are bone & blood, not tin
But in those gauntlets look archangelic, electrical:
Must all this be shot
Developed silver salts
To pierce the picture like thorns the head of Christ
Round & forever down.
 


THE PECULIAR & LUMINOUS SIGNATURE of things
Darkens at twilight.
Thin was the day
Now we get into the meat of it:
Quarrels & suffering
The torment of Eve.
Now the toy fireplace which runs on the smallest battery is dead
The refrigerator box yellows from cream white
The rocking chair holds a ghost lady.
This ghost lady is not I.
Learning hew weight of looking                        plumblines are drawn from sunset
To imagined dawn.
What stresses the muscle of the eye most
Tints the iris deeply
Is this patterning in the true            the ball bouncing beyond, beyounce, magical thinking:
This strains the little gray cells to near-breaking
Like two arms stretching a piece of rubber.
It could snap                        anyplace: at where first cousin’s boy died right there at home
From leukemia having gone back & forth to hospital so many times:
The buck stopped at Christmas. He would not go in now:
His two kid sisters quarreled over the Christmas cake but he got to keep it in his room
Since he was leaving this blue planet
& wanted some strange luminous
thin won
by a tough tussle
rogue magic
so that he held there
in his very, attenuated, El Greco hands
the final & luminous signature of things.
 
 

THIN BOXING GLOVES                         like lung tissue
Our battles begin in late afternoon                        blue-veined, branching:
The wolf of twilight scaring us slightly only with its fangs
Those whites like the icebox.
Her calves are growing, little sister, but not as firm as mine;
The very musculature I am to lose in five years to polio, shows tanned, I could be a Grecian girl 
               in the photograph
And indeed am:
Quite.
The Lesbian coming out at fourteen.
But what did I know of crushes on girls then?
 
Who am I to say a lifelong passion of writing only with light once the fingers are blown off by a hand grenade
And only the stumps remain: it is hard to carry things.
But there are sensations
When I go near the stove I twitch
But that is only an eyebrow twitch & I am able to bat it back.
Take my boxing gloves, also of translucent lung tissue, and bellow out the first of envy for all the other girls
Pure penance, pure passion.
 


“SMILE, FOR YOUR LOVER COMES” was written over a bridge in Central Park
I thought it ironic: those were the years of medical conferences, I was used as a subject in operating theaters 
               for “demonstrations”:
Lie stock-still                  or your doctor comes
With instruments that can open the ribs
Glass like the two lungs
Shine in almost oiled
Penitential air:
The heart is beating.
Again, I and my sister are walking on sand
Listening to late Schubert.
We are not funded
The soul’s pence are put down, paid for
But the soul is precise
In her longing
To go back         skate on sand.
Thus walk on crutches on sandy ice-granules:
Imagine a log Yule-burning
Imagine the pain chipped from the bone.
She is shy
Of all she says
So, like a locket, the doctor, she closes the ribcage back again
Lacing over the chest
The ribbons of an August afternoon:
Boy-girl clad in vest for the rest of the battle of a lifetime.




“SMILE, FOR YOUR LOVER COMES” was written over a bridge in Central Park:
but that was not the emotion I experience of first green, infant green:
You were crystal:
we were old children from the start. I had learned
to tense up when the surgeon approached:         scalpel at the ready: then retractor:
instruments that can open the ribs like spread-eagling a fan:
Glassy the two lungs                  mirroring a lifetime of smoking calmed to a shine: so like a child 
               outside confessional, on hands and knees breathing apparatus, tree-branched:
Shine in oiled
Penitential air:
The heart is beating.         A double-spread book with rare priceless ruby binding
Oxblood leather:
Readable but raw:
“A rogue-red
a wild fox                  having got at the amethyst graces: I cannot synthesize
Or order
Items of the past twelvemonth:
one angel on the head of a pin dancing         atoning, a figurative death in stone:.
Her alternate waving a torch of flame
Passion of my first Lesbian lover
Who says stay close but not too close.
Quarrels are ripping air          like nails gashing silk:
We are the very ilk
Of passion
Yet poised
For death
Destruction: two stone angels carved of clay, Code stone
Without blinking
Gazing, salt stinging our iris
At the total leveling of the city of Dresden: Firebombed:
All women. All children.

A Pulitzer Prize nominee several years ago for SPECTRAL FREEDOM, Lynn Strongin has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and this year for the Lambda Award. Received an NEA creative writing grant in New Mexico in the seventies. Studied with Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and others.
 
 
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