Lynn Strongin

          MAYBE OUR LIVES ARE ON LOAN
          So must be returned.
Once the virus flattens
Libraries will be overflowing
Return sacks avalanching:
I am in another place from Herne where I was born.

Borne into the last
Ingo light of being an immigrant
Last from Eastern Europe
All I own in the bundle on my bending spine.



WAITING FOR THE WOUND TO RE-OPEN
Lasting till breathing evens
Out
things one wants to do.

These are those:
Getting thru the CHW woman’s bathing me:
Community health workers have fobs, gloves, names go on breathing
With the repeated bathing
A ritual till we are smooth as ivory tablets
Spending hours in a skinny nun-like hospital bed despite its silvers, dull as pewter, unshining
The divine. 
Bathing
Subconscious like breathing.
 All calm. Until the morning she tips over a scalding vat of water.
Luckily it spills on the rug, gets mopped up. I rest afterward in black silence in the room  knowing the wound 
        is partially closed: like the globe, it will re-open.



I USE MY BACKPACK MORE & more these days
Salt-water taffy melted in the Heidi Pak
Particles of balconies that hold us
Dissolve in air:
Stretched like the virus over records, months, historied
Everything I have given up
To remain & have it find me,

What is lost
The countless I curate into a godly gallery:
Lit
Lit I tell you
The loved and impassioned:  I cannot, will not beg for it, but now it is too late, lover.



YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO SEE THE SKY ABOVE YOUR ROOF
Gritty  still pretty
In wheelchair
& leggings

Leg, which cannot be straightened out:
The sky she saw above her roof
Was she, in Bonn, smoking, knees to chin, on back porch

Here, away from the wound
Theatre corner in niche of our room
Hospital bed bled down to clothy white by day

An insect hotel, butterflies in opposite niche:
They magic me
Positive proof
 The liquid molten blue flowing above
 That one must have sky above the roof, love.



UNBRAIDED waters become blond
Tresses loosened:
Argument returns to calm conversation.

We never dreamed this thing:
When a lady of the home becomes immobilized
 Then both ladies of the home
 Are obliged to sleep in spoons.

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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