Lynn Strongin


                                   RAG DOLLS
                                                 &       
                        Touch IN A TIME OF PLAGUE
 
          Pressed flowers as manifestation of the Muse
  
 
 
We studied the rows of stamps under glass and thought about how 
their tiny castles, poets, cars, and flowers would soon be sent off to all cardinal points. . .

 ‘Nostalgia’ was invented as a diagnosis in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, 
designating a pathological homesickness in mercenary soldiers. 
Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia, 59 
 
 
 
ONE HIDES much during the doctor’s visit:
Flowers pressed under glass.
That we are a ship passing the middle passage:
 
Life is all about kinship & histories:
Yours is Britain: a child one of five, all have shoes.
World War II. There on the smoking ground.
 
Mine across the pond
our family. . . approaching emotional dissolution: what nerves are left 
are dried flowers long-stemmed placed in a water glass.
 
Ruin, bravely, gallantly, brushed,
covered with the care one does truths with the dr:
or the caution a painter takes to gloss a patina. Our love engine was failing.
 
Now our own marriage
Has passed bleak waters:
It’s been a year since being bathed, body & soul
 
Stem- to-stern. Everything is dialed so low.
To lie in intimacy.
Again, The one that got away. Rabbit under glass all fur showing. Our pitching ship. Pitchblende air:
            I am putting on my oxygen mask & going back for you:
            I will be near, clear, here: under glass clear as a glass of water, blue-green as the atmosphere.
 
 
 
EVERYTHING IS DIALED so low
One presses the ear
to the little cities of the radio.
 
One cannot wizard it thru
Nor can polio croon a love song.
“Leave the door ajar.”
 
Hanging sister’s picture on the wall
Like leaving the door ajar
for ecstasy.
 
What does the mobile heartspeaker say?
Lyrical invention & dark wit lift cloud cover of day::
Across the north, showers—rain or snow—could be tapering off.
            Lo waist-high wheat like faith: I promise ye:
            Tomorrow’s heat, door ajar, will dial things higher: still not pitched toward soprano, 
            pure & sweet.
 
 
 
MY SECRETS are like butterflies
Cocooned; catalogued. Catafalqued on yellowing vellum.
Ladybugs in hibernation, slow-shifting cloud,  an orange-black colony, in the bath window.
 
You are wholly outstanding, fascinating.
How does one order a bed for two in a Boston marriage? Shame, pain of hiding.
Bluestockings are another thing. The fatal sting.
 
I could feel your heart on beams, burning.
The hive humming
Nuns homing. White wimples blooming.
 
            This is the downstream extremity:
            The Bible of hexagons, the virus, the lost last honey.
 
 

TO TOUCH the deepest sort of anguish
Wear no gloves:
Milk silk.
 
Wear bravery in the heart
Hidden like dancing shoes
When your legs are gone.
 
So, wearing the invisible
Leave the door to ecstasy open:
Your gift, devotion. Mine, to write, the ocean
            Upon rocks which could kill beating
            In memory of the world, the metaphysics of longing.
 
 
 
(Johann Sebastian Bach)
 
ORPHANED by ten
father re-married             
to lose his second wife within ten moons.
 
Boy in nightdress, seductive as a girl
By moonlight
Copying notes from music manuscripts. Bright, ivory nightdress: pearl
 
Horses cantering
White, bright as inspiration shafting Johanne:
            Flat, lean chest of a child, boy-groom, girl-bride in the wings:
            Pen scrawling in the orphanage of wild things: door left ajar to the mind of metaphysics, 
            heady, mulled wine.
 
 

RAG DOLLS 
I have begun:
The mist started to rise leaving us partially exposed;
 
Though I am in age, silver-haired,
Do you palpitate returning to me?
 
You  have plucked photographs, birds from berry bushes
I lift words thorns of the sea.
 
Look. See.
We may soon be missing each other.
 
Sea-thorns:
Earthborn
 
Two older Lesbians:
            I saw in your eyes. The one I would marry.
            In my eighties        rag dolls loom: Rouge kissed off cheeks: dangling button eye. 
            Why do we lie formal & still as ragdolls after a year’s forced celibacy?
 


IF YOU CAME HOME wounded, young thing, bird
Well, you know I can mend a wing
Or two.
 
Framed on the page
We two
Like a black & white still. Winter sun matchstick-lighting our window sill.
 
Where the flowers you bought last week
Hold fragrance
If not color still.
 
But the backbend
Of a swan
Is beyond me
 
So would be words then:
Kept in a box like pearls
They would glisten thru tears which are salt & cut corrode them.
 
Coldly beautiful
Relentlessly
Truthful.
 
I’d stay pure:
You would, too, in my mind.
Beside you
            The lens. The tripos that blew over in the wind.
            I would be beside myself with what strengthens, lengthens to be strong but never bends or blends.
 


***
 
A VENTRILOQUIST THROWS her voice into a doll
A cowboy a lariat
We throw out bad-broken things.
 
Not birds
Not bent wings:
That would be to jettison flight.
 
I have day-frights
& night-frights.
‘I really give off static when my nails are done’ says my community bather.
 
I’m in the middle of a conversation
With silver, my computer: why be haunted with rag dolls in a time of war?
& robin’s egg blue sky & red bricks.
 
The sun just ignites you.
            Too pale against sky to photograph
            To hold too treacherous a blue.
 
 
 
I DID NOT GET YOUR Hannukah flowers
Blue
The color of van Gogh’s sky
 
The unsafe side of the mind.
Our room fills with the bloom of printer’s ink.
Why do I miss rag dolls in a time of plague?
 
Without arms
& hands
How can they reach out to enfold
            Now old
            I dream your Hannukah Flowers: too hot to touch,
            In a welder’s arc, acetylene blue, killing to hold.
 
           
 
WHAT IF I COULD SMOKE in the doctor’s waiting room
That would be back in the former century. So far a better one.
You know, one can take a smoke outside the hospital lobby 
          where the gift shop & grand piano are.
 
Wreaths would cloud the saint’s face in the garden. IV in arm.
Who would call a prison warden? Down from the cancer ward, in wheelchair:
In the last twenty seconds of life
 
            Will the camera click
            The lens letting in what darkness waits, what light greatbird beats, 
            the great admission.
 


My name is EMMA STONECIPHER
 
 
 
ADORABLE BADNESS, you are a blessing
Stringbean
Unheard
Marginalized
I drop off for you a mitzvah, mother’s sapphire ring, one stone missing: the best kind 
            of sapphire black-blue
The unchanging landscape is death
The every-changing landscape of life
Touch thru quarantine
Paralyzed since the age of twelve
Here’s the touchstone;
I see bears in yellow oilskin slickers
This recurring cancer is merely refrain:
The part of the burden you carry
The inside story
Invisible pain
Bedbound
Holding the poster for a horse, reined by a sheet.
 
Nightboat mine, I grieve, I mourn.
I also compose songs.
 
O the sky is tangerine over your loss.
My nightbed too.
I need you.
I tire of my daybed
terribly
 
The snow doesn’t depict every one’s bestiary:
But here is mine: the sound, the color of the bees.
Yes, too, there is failure
To stop cancer
To quit fear what kind of future will I have to die in?
But in adorable badness
Little you comes back to shove the adult out of here.
            Bring me back to the jars of honey.
 
 
Watching hydrangea from windows:
The evolved lifelong struggle for courage:
Suffer for courage. It is worth it.
 
I rein this sorrow with a sheet of sleet, snow soon
That euphoria which comes when you know you’re dying
To get out
Of ennui                    spun darkness & mischief:
Of watching folk carry refrains to & fro
To markets
Of most tender touching.
It is unimaginable
I would be inconsolable over the loss of you.
 
 

                “The metaphysics of the quotidian” Charles Wright “tomorrow” in Sestets
 
HEART beats in a time of dark-age plague:
Each room, the four chambers, well-hewn, hinged
Open
On love’s repair.
 
In the work room is a dead bird,
A book of poems,
got stuck in one spoke
Silver spokes against rain:  wheeling, “If you don’t shine,  you are darkness”
 
Searching among rubble for the light which shines from an outreached hand.
Moving out into the universe where
Crows bleaked day, an umbrella
I ran into Clare. One oncologist was “Scary.” The radiation oncologist kinder.
 
Passion drove me out of this cot into the weather.
            Our old fourposter, stored in the hall
            Scarred with the illness flame torch touching every nerve: “If you don’t shine. . .”
 


TWO-YEAR-OLD in a winter of plague
After his bath,           . . .waves to the babies on the swing calendar in the hall.
His mother chloroxed the playground jungle gym this afternoon.
A winter soldier
At two years of age, Caleb.
In the not-quite-dark of the afternoon spins his top:
Sun has already dipped for the day and will stay down for a long time.
 
The sea was his father’s origin:
Powerful
Destructive, loving.
As winter approaches, his son misses him most:
Twice-vigilant.
 
This year Caleb has seen more giraffes than children.
A child walked down the street yesterday,  “Uh oh, people,” he said to his mother.
 
Dream me next to the one I need.
I missed the rising moon last night. When my parents argued, my light was out: it was eerily late:
            But that was worse than missing a birthday cake, dialed lower than a lost play date.
 
 
 
THE DISEASE has altered the choreography of funerals
 


CHILDREN will pop in & out of frame
How to take the pulse
Of parents?
The 1940 population survey reflected father, mother & me
Censused in a baby.
 
Two Italian teenagers fall in love in Rome during the Renaissance
 
Winter water
Winter soldier
one feels so fragile I touch a brittle branch, and it breaks.
 
Night falls while the choreography of funeras
Alters
The dance.



NIGHTLY
 
 
 
WANTING TO MAKE SURE the world remembers you
The ornaments of the world
The bright balloon of my desires sinks & lowers
An anchor
Against despair.
The library & other places for connection provide a “Template against the great ocean  
            of longing that can flood this life.
If these doors darken
What then? 
Are we not back up against the bleak portals of quarantine during the Black Death?
Where is the partridge in a pear tree?
Two turtle doves
Three French hens
The four calling birds from France 14th century
Skip the fifth? 
Oblivion. Forgetfulness. Put snowfall on the screen.
The sixth day
Now you are remembering: your name carved in sand.
The dry years.
. . winters that will not wash away.
Perpetual comfort. Peace. Poor little Jesus Boy.
When the light goes out on love 
You open the drawer and find not only feathers
but a bird gone long ago
You open the drawer & find not only
Wanting to make sure the world remembers you
You write letters, bake ginger
With longing
Bread, close your eyes and play the piano. Hum anything.
 
 
 

HE ARRIVES at a commandeering church in the mountain
A freezing outpost ravaged by typhus.
Cinematic. Epic.
Streaming.
 
Emily Dickinson enrolled in Mount Holyoke
When she was sixteen
exquisite forgotten herbarium at the intersection of science and poetry 
composed with passionate patience
& sensuous attention.
Botany allowed women to enter science thru the back door.
 
She pressed flowers as a manifestation of the muse.
 


YOU WANT TO step gingerly around belief
Onions are turning golden.
I want to make my life go slowly to last   making whorls of lace:
Patience, nails, and wood.. .
Hands for lace-making.
Mine for keyboards.
To give love love love
Without giving in.
. . . egg icicle star:
We all need a break from being who we are
I lived hard. I was here.
I am the milky sky. The steely.
Weigh your soul against a feather
If soul is too heavy, it will descend to be eaten by crocodiles
“Lincoln Park after Dark” or “Russian Navy”
“Leonardo’s Model color”
My children are all far-shining stars
I stay here.
Nostalgia even for the unloved,
One finger swirling the sand.
I don’t know what to do this little hospital bed. I want to hug you.
There may be many Penny Farthings.
Only one dream-coffee
Why must we be in different countries
You want to step as though walking on eggs or glass
Breathing carefully
Around what gives wood its holy gloss.
 


[Carel Fabritius]. . . for Fiona and Gail
 
OUR HOUSE IS A basket of light
Containing cherries,
Hard glass candies,
Nibs mainly.
Our house is a bowl of night-
Falls
holding erasers,
Erasures of faulted love,
Losses mainly.
See the child run after the ball
You run after me
I run after the word that slid from me like an oiled pearl or like a child as I embraced another day.
All I have given to age in one year is a litany;
Bath-happiness
Swinging my body
From bed to silver wheels. Dining with the beloved
kitchen hours     piano evenings
Now in a hospital cot, more than ever I love thee
Like poet's poem memorized
Lifted from page
As painter lifts paint with palette knife.
No quarrel with quarantine; but this is my private quarrel with God.
Carel Fabritius was a great painter even after he
Lost most of his work un the great fire in which that historic city
In Holland burned.
One painting achieved fame;
‘The Goldfinch’
Caged, feathers alight with hidden fire;
ignited one-by-one feathers borned, burned.
Water-cool his song cerulean-ceramic green.


 

WHAT WOULD we touch 
Given hands again?
After the hand grenade exploded in our hand,
Thrown across the bombed street as a toy to a brother?
How would we look in mirrors after Hiroshima?
This morning is a mirror:

“. . .the rows of stamps under glass. . . their tiny castles, poets, cars, and flowers 
. . . soon. . .sent off to all cardinal points” 
            Donna Stonecipher,  The Ruins of Nostalgia, 59

The fragility of all things:    digits, wristbones. Microscopes, vaccines, third test runs. 
Morning exhaustion Midnight weariness. Viruses shaped like crystals.
Feathers under glass in wood cases,
Paper roses, silk violets gathering dust circles,
cabuchons of water drops glistening on real roses.
People are not cut-outs on stone
Park benches
Blood being richer than water
It pulses in wrists
Purple blue
As though wounded
They are enduring a mortal wound.
We need extra balms during this anxious year.
This is the real world: not cutout grass rising thru concrete: London’s pride after war.
This is the real sorrow
Thirst for touch which against all odds blooms:
This is nostalgia: not its ruins.
 
 
 
THANK you for your time & patience
If you have any extra
A free lunch
A tent city in the park.
We can’t get there.
Not from here.
So from where? Otherwhere.
 
Trucks roll out from Belgium in the dark of dawn.
Deep breaths are taken in Britain as the beginning
Opens
Survivors carry unseen scars
In Bergamo:
We who have endured a year isolation for bedrest
Reach out a hand
Anyway.
 
We do not look at the hand.
It has a new ring.
God forbid. Everything. The Royal Free Hospital in London is one of the first.
The worst wave returning to wash out schoolchildren
In New York
My home
The Big Apple. Be with you in a New York Minute.
Everything I cherish & yearn for
            Visible now only in a broken connection
            In a heartbeat be with you for our salvation.
 


I REMEMBER peace:
It was Picardy third in a Bach suite
Ending a minor melody on a major. Key.
 
The whole world still is at grave risk.
The Blue Ridge Mountains in Kentucky
Twilights
People smoke on porches, careful to take the tobacco out of paper wrapper & crush.
 
The only place, beloved, you can go is the library
Which was the peak of my ecstasy as a child
Stony-cold sober,
I saw two of every thing .       Now old: running a home from a bed
I knew a woman who ran her home from an iron lung.
I cannot keep hiding what we are, a Boston marriage:
That is all & that is everything.
 
The middle of January can be a dark time.
Don’t hold your breath.
There’s death, horses in harness. God bless.
I am
That’s me
Getting high outside the hospital room door:
 
It is like emerging from a Pennine blizzard
And total obscurity to become a celebrity.
In a telephone booth
A kiosk
Always red, a large love is being conducted.
This dream-story will take much revision.
 
            My most archival friend: I tell you this.
            If we are still masked by spring, you will still have 
            a spark in your eyes: I’ll be ripe for ignition.
 


THE KINDNESS OF STAGES
Backstage
Houselights flicker like a moth: off. On.
Twenty-minute bell,
The house is open.
“You’re on.”
“How many curtains?”
Smoky green room in its watery circles dimming, a heart brighteningl
Applause
Then curtains
Everything steeped in the smoke of the green room.
I want my legacy to be clear-cut, one winter after another;
Nights asleep in the kiosk,
Bird,
Head under wing.
For a human it would have been spine-wounding.
Is the color of my bruise
Purple-blue, Beinine, I ask you, Pierrot in harlequin diamonds.
Our family was fractured
Frameless
Brown rooms melting. . .old sepia photograph
Given years on the outermost rim,
We each fought for center-stage. And won.
Crystallized.
Not in stages it came
Unkind
The opposite of moonrise over the Appalachians
flowing of the Mississippi
Robbed of poetry
Outside the wheels of the paddle boats turning
Taking the curve ball & cramming it down the batter's throat:
Like the heart’s varied oscillations.
 


HOW MANY HOURS to stare at a doorknob?
A doorframe
Cut flowers in a room
fondly


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