Lynn Strongin


DISTANCE IS THE REALM OF FOX

Distance – is not the Realm of Fox
Nor by Relay of Bird
Abated – Distance is
Until thyself, Beloved.
Emily Dickinson

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
Lisel Mueller: "Monet Refuses the Operation"
 
 
I ONCE HAD windows & a mother
I could look thru glass.
Waiting for what would buoy me
 
Not the moon in all its butters.
Unbroken. Unlost.
I had a pony & I had a prairie. 
 
Historians bleed their eyes dry over vellums,
Monks transcribe Amens.
A market for millet evolves
            While in the planetarium stars revolve, in England Annie, a land girl switches on her 
                      bike light in the dark. One shatters a glass. Life shatters a mother:
            I throw my hair forward, praying to a window & a mother, that translucency once again.
           
           
 
STRENGTH BLOOMS entering my hands
My lover is deconditioned from taking care of me.
It is a while before a hospital bed becomes free
 
Flying, white.
Quiet, vulnerable strong remnants, despite ruin.
Many-roofed buildings in moonlight out my window.
 
I shake free of the pain in my back, opioids wearing off: I see
Buildings, childhood, night, thoughts
Non-militant soldiers reflected in the penny-colored eyes of my ragdoll
            It’s the ordinary furnace, moths flickering: I flick my bicycle light on
            Strength blooms, my hands shaping a small Buda: one boychild holding dove re-entering love.
 


BOAR BRISTLES soaking in turpentine,
A day’s work done
Milky light floods the muntin panes
 
Slowly
Like a child drinking:
Slowly, holy, all burners of the four-burner woodstove glowing like coke.
 
We each hold the tiny bottle, Burnout, in our hands
Cupped
For the arrival of a small bird, or babe
            Instead,
            Bristles scented of delicious linseed oil men the day’s work, burndown discouragement, 
                      all exile painted like.a child drinking, nourished, wholly, slowly.
 


I CAME DOWN in the storm for you
Can’t quite see the prairie sky
So listen for it in music
 
A hand-holding terror
Strikes while you are near.
A bullet of pure energy
 
Sucked in.
In the storm I came down for you
Driving
            Like the firebox glowing, coal alive
            While all else failed to thrive. I came down. Storm, bike lantern to prove life to grieve.
 


ARE YOU A LILAC? or a lady bending toward me
In a glass jar
Water cloudy? Late life love, tender. You folding: tall, I small, speed.
 
Are you in silks
Or jeans
Tied around the belly?
 
Your bling
Shining
against increased heart medicine
            I rise from age-aches,
            Opened more each night           curled, embryonic in morning.
 
 

WELCOME TO MY DAZZLING, dangerous world
Make lace
Take place:
 
Those spaces
Which let light in.
I am like a detective after informal codes of behavior:
 
But not about a body covered in blood:
About the hoods, the little bits & bobs. The English robin, diminutive, heartbreatkingly small.
Worn by words. 
            The way we go down one avenue, in disguise
            After the unseen world, palpable, dazzling, but not visible to our eyes.
 


NEXT, A BOWL OF SOUP
Reluctantly, tearfully
I move out, my inspiration high as a snowdrift. Dream
 
Of one British Square which houses women who want a room of their own
Into copper-colored veins
Of struggle, hope
 
“The Sealark” was the trip I traveled in dream:
In dream it peaked,
It sank into water green, ocean become ravine: listening month-after-month to the same grooves: 
                    I fly over a radiance of rooves.
            My ship was not sized that small: I looked back, I travel as far as this room’
            S corner. I cry until my eyes are more green.
 
 

HIS CIGARETTE glowing on the dusk, the dawn
I’d come to a different land.
Like a bicycle torch or firebox glowing.
 
Now, blue larkspur time
I miss him.
Accepting, embracing hardship again and again: sunset a thorn around torn memory,
            bruise blooms.
 
Its ritual, the handshake.
Tweed collar up, head bent
His mind always weighing a dilemma.
            Now, age a drift of ash on one side the scale
            Youth, feathers on the other. Our eyes meeting, a blown spark, a memory cinder, the only way 
                      we acknowledge each other.
 
 

THERE IS A BEE SWARM
& outside the small boutique store
A sculpture.
 
Borodin would fall asleep on the bed
When he came home from his chemist’s lab
Because his house was filled with people
 
Grandmother’s boudoir
Walnut
So polished, brought over the ocean, shone like an ocean.
            There is a bee swarm to which I am sworn
            Outside death, inside breathing.
 


EMILY Dickinson has a very creative relationship with paper
Lines written on back of a chocolate wrapper
Inspire a universe of speculation.
 
And the knowledge chocolate from Paris was available in Amherst at that time.
“The things that never can come back are several.”
The humorous treatment of meeting a spider in the privy.
 
Logically I know the way out of this life is death.
I chose breath
After breath
            Prayer upon prayer
            Stacked like Amens to a God one can only sketch in water, remotely imagine..
 


I AM YOUR REDFOX
Your dreadlocks
Take me to the temple
 
My homelife is a beehive
Pacing my bedroom
Ceiling with my eyes
 
Hiving honey as I can
Comb
Incandescent, private, immediate grief, a short time only
            As the tomb
            Moss covering the name.
 


SUNSET is a thorn
Around torn memory,
Bruise blooms, blossoms redden ground.
 
The realm of fox, beloved
Must be without sound
Else how could I go my sorrow in camouflage of snow and rain
 
Sorrows whiten to ivory
Rain chains
With hardly visible.
            So I go forth each morning of the world
            to evening, disappointment swallowed by the moon.
 


WHEN THE NEWS STOPPED & the dial still glowed
It snowed
I was a child
 
I prayed for more voices in our household
Brave is what one can be
When what fails is love
 
Like light in the eastern window.
Bed is best
Sun sets in the west
            Reddening the last of supper things
            The longing for a father’s love too, though our mother wore her brightest vest.
 
 
 
I TAKE MY Shadow home
Begging to reconsider my boundaries
Inlets of ocean, lace on spring trees.
 
Wrinkled, it is smoothed, shadow:
My buttoned-up love,
Look
 
The lunch we never had: every zany element counts, a brooch, eye-shadow.
The private tears of a child
Very small, in the corner:
            Major
            Music stirs in me against the dance, last saved for best, we never had.
 


IF LIFE is a sadness that unspools,
My rising up is my bending
Down a dancer’s position

Silk flares
Not to be put out
Against darkness of morning. War accustomed me to rations: I rip out an hour for an outing.

Night
Autumn
Winter best, my feast of energy, exhilaration. You hear the robin, see the fog. I feast on starvation.
            Snow falling upon the English robin who sings.
            You in raspberry winter, vest embroidered,  mobile. breathless, in plan muslin, I wait my cue 
                     silent in the wings.



UNDOCUMENTED
Your name climbed off the page
The realm of fox
 
The sublimes of childhood
Not like now, ravage of age:
waiting for a specialist
 
No specialist exists for this relay:
It still pierces
Poignant:
            A world populated by outsiders: ventriloquiets, puppeteers
            One wants something nobody ever had: unwritten history of the heart, inked in blood & tears.
 


ALL GOD’S creatures
The baby albatross
Looks like an angelic scrub brush. Sky, color flax, mulberry silk locks.
 
Bristle
fledgling wrens breasts color of wild rice fields.
On sand, plover. On heather, lover.
 
My gymnastic energies plowed back under. Monk’s tea-blotched vellum notes blown asunder.
Above,
Below
            God’s wonder
            all speckled wild things moored by desire.
 
 
 
I GIVE YOU THESE
Clous-tapestries,
Milk bottle blue-greys
 
The wax paper cup at top
An aged beauty’s bunnet;
Wild clover, a bee upon it;
 
The lifelong struggle to rise
From love truths
And lies;
            The prayer for a dress of coral linen
            Bone-china wondrous in its simplicity; is divinity a given.
 
 
 
CARRYING ABOUT your bruised heart in your body
God’s shadow
Monarch butterfly                    open as a wound:
 
Hound belling in autumn woods, a sound
disguised in winter,
Down the road the dry goods store
 
Bulk rice,
Sunflower seeds
A mother’s flour
            for baking, a child’s needs, a toy; lead hope home, the last straw, a hoop
            the bruised heart at honeycomb, love’s mead.
           
           
 
TO SOFTEN, blur, & finally banish what you regret
No haloes around old age
I will not return to a universe without love
 
Of islands of lost children
I am no longer going to the pain clinic for injections
In frozen winter. I miss that elation, your buying me a pullover black dress with turquoise        flowers.
 
Alone & in a honeycomb
The sweetness frozen in the cold
We taxied home
            Too traumatized to talk
            Sign language, a smile, you carving a heart in the windowfrost; me inserting the 
                      arrow-knife laughing.
 


THE BLINDMAN at the Gate
The contemplative we failed to be
Transparent
 
Each gesture
It takes a cosmos to make a human.
We turned on the hall light when someone was coming up the stairs, the dark climb.
 
The slow one now will soon be fast.
Gas lamps as angels.
The ancient pills I took alone, the hills I drove to and owned.
            The blindman is coming down:
            The Florida key was dark & unpopulated: triage existed you could see the sky. 
                      God take us home.
 
 

YOUR HAND in our hand, one by one, transparently, take us home.
Home along the highway
Home along the sand.
 
Offerings of water bottles to migrants at border crossings
Visiting military cemeteries
KKK book in giftshops.
 
At eleven, I sat cross-legged in the camp’s forest ground
Sweater tied around my hips, looped in front
I drank up the clouds
            Their milk
            Wildlife on my door step: my last to be earthly, workboots clad, steps.
 
 

I USED TO dread getting up in a house without wine
My shirttails tied around my jeans.
God, I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be hugged by a storm.
 
I wanted to be unparalyzed
Reversal
I hid my tears under shade
            The number is sublime
            A little glass of wine.
 


ARMS AKIMBO I said “Welcome”
Shirt tucked in jeans
Don’t forget what you come from
 
Canvases up against walls
I’m a bad girl
Bought a black diamond with my wheelchair money
 
Rather sparkle than roll
O my soul.
What I came for, what I came from
            Was music
            Running, hitting the wall heart bursting open.
 
 

RIPPED THE BLINDERS off for the whole world to see, acts of violence: what relents?        how
hide my death from me
Parents, from thee?
 
In sequestration
Your scarlet borders enchant me:
The children of Cloth farm loved the Chocolate Box charm of an English village
 
And to bathe in the pond
Like life
Breath-taking in its breadth and emptiness
                        restoration is painstaking like no other…task 
                        but it was done to preserve the quality of unworldliness that had 
                                  so disturbed his mother.
 
 

IN THE ROUGH SILKS of my life I bend
Wealth beyond sand
Grains
 
Or ink.
Europe out of the question due to architecture
A few strands have been saved:
            Above all the ones
            Despite paralysis, priorities on back shelves, above all, the ones I loved.

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.

Strongin’s work has been featured recently in UK’s "Poetry Kit" as well as winning second poetry prize in ART4US, in DC, for "Flowers Swallowing Bees." Mike Maggio said of it: "This poem uses language and imagery in new and fresh ways. Language flows across the page almost like the bees it evokes. . ." She has been featured in Brett Alan Sander’s blog with her cycles "A Wondrous Thing" and "Saturday Afternoon Taffetas." Her forthcoming chapbook, SLOW DARK FILM, will be published by Right Hand Pointing.

 
 

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