Lynn Strongin


RICH RAGS
                                    or
                                    
STORIES FROM THE CLOCK AT GRAND CENTRAL STATION
   (For Deborah, my love, who took a long rail trip to meet me)
 
 
CLOCK went tick-tock, nine hour glad rags, where did we ever go:
Glass blown out
While we left our life, hanging fire
 
Quit Barros Street
For the Bottoms:
While now we embrace our age, with tenderness or rage
 
This hermitage
Then
Page-by-page, divorce papers, nicotine-bitten turned in the north-to southern wind.
          What did we find?
          Bayous: boys girls, stuttering, on shack-decks of re-used lumber: tears sprung: they didn’t 
                    speak our loved language, our own tongue.
 
 

I’LL GET BEYOND HERE TO EVENING
Up north we had a deep tub, claw-footed
Down south a sprinkler shower that shot in all directions
 
The smell of fried fish reaching us from thec hip’s shop.
Down South girls wanted to get out of their blue dresses to shimmy
Up north, they pulled wool skirts over their knees.
 
The thing is
What held the key, or keys to this new existence so shrunken, 
bleached the flowers chloroxed like the sky had no color.
          I want you to call be again your beautiful girl in my eighties.
          South even the bayous were depressive, slow as the sloth the water sluggish 
                    floated thru the reeds. The girl who’d had polio had bent deformed 
                    one knee: later, like me.


 
HOW TO GLOSS over it
The unglossy south
Scant shine
 
These trees
This shack
This swamp: not mine.
 
Yet forever am I trying to love the “not mine.’
Here, pain, deformity, atrophy: put your small childhand in mine:
Icicle-ville It will be made to warm
          The lino kitchen in which we hug:
          Try again, Lord how I wish to be flat-chested one again as a boy of nine or fourteen.


 
STORIES from Grand Central
The huge marble room with the clock whose case ballooned
Out glass
 
Before I learned the stares of deformed children
When a new child was brought in,
Woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Is there a right side?
 
Had we an “obituarist” what could have been written up?
That I’d spent hours in Grand Central Station mesmerized by the clock
I know you need a homeland, heart, not two:
          I decided to return to my homeland
          To complete the tapestry of my. Life: bookended by war, the ward still with small heads 
                    in a row, silent with hidden mischief & mirth as ever. Forever.
 

 
ONE CAN NEVER tell it all but partial with the lips of a child
Fitting now a tree
Now a swath of sky into the jigsaw puzzle
 
Comforting
Christmas balls, shone before my eyes, our trip South, the orange grove
Lit up fragrance, orange night, riding over the Jesus bar
 
We were small & peripheral
At Grand Central: I was learning to make my heart a lace-edged valentine;
Getting our freedom papers, the divorce:
          Now at eighty, I long to get up & boil
          Water for a cup of broth: I miss nothing of the South, not even the oranges: only the austere 
                    north. My north.
 
 

 
WE GOT THERE: no home run, a wooden slatted platform
A boy pushed me off a bridge
Rich Rags.
 
Un-wealth me, unrich, strip me of that curse
Life was hard up north
But this is worse:
 
Palm trees at Christmas, a bouncing ball, no skirt at all
To speak
Of & my baby doll, Susie, bisque head cannot cry at all: her tears
          Like us are held in thrall:
          This is the curse: child back against the wall, eyes screwed so tight shut it feels like hail 
                    falls upon them. Hail!
 


I DO NOT KNOW Dublin, do not know London
My feet know Montreal
That one old world city: getting our lives back on track. Parallel. Steam engine.
 
Other than that New York is my home.
Was
Now numerals buzz like bees around the elegant clock-balloon in the station
 
Hiving honey, earning ember of passing stress & each others hand:
          But not sweet. Salt tears
          To the tongue.
 
 
 
LEAVING OURSELVES would make us better persons:
Us taking a short journey from ourselves
After the war: but this was still Marrow Lane, the thorned rose:
 
For mother, piles of diapers
Pipes that banged
No hot water, stove that failed to ignite: a casual elegance but suspense ratcheted up:
 
For me
Ignition of sorrow that fuel which kept pumping;
We piled into the old Buick we called Pinto
          & drove, from farm to farm, of wetland, the poverty, the poorness in the bone of hearing children 
                    speak sentences, our birth-tongue
          We could not understand.  And it was always to my stringbean self I did return.
 
 

AMONG THE MOST ANCIENT scourges to infect the heart of a child,
It shortened my childhood
May have lengthened my life.
 
Clock went tick-tock:
We put our lives in hock
Drew them out unsold: they felt old, musty
 
All became a morning-to-night scold:
Not unlike now when I long to hold
Her
          Who slips out of my arms
          Like sunlight from days. It is night all way.
 
 
 
“Who will love the old
If not the old?” (Katha Pollitt, “Brown Furniture”
 
ANCIENT, hair the color of milk
But silk
Fine
 
I tried blue purple for a time wanting to make a smash hit
Only with my own
A few folk on the street.
 
It was sweet as jasmine
Or fruit-wine.
Eyes hurt from not being out so long: squint
          The pattern-in-the carpet
          Shows a peacock, heart aflame, cry the heartbroken, street-smart cry of the insane. Workhouse-bane.
 
 

I’VE GONE THE DISTANCE for you
A diehard romantic:
Goat eating flowers. Brown furniture
 
All my earliest childhood khaki,
Later brown as far as you could see:
Furniture, walls, even the hint of the se beyond my eye.
 
It was not brown but green
And there aha! There the enter in
The moonlight covering the piano keys
          Like satin: low ashen sounds.
          Unbroken except for the kicks I gave my mother, alert to the music, going back the distance, to her womb.
 


WITHOUT you I’d be an old solo
Without fine-spun melancholy,
Now that robust elegance is gone
 
My blue bomber’s jacket given to the Sally Anne,
In me the fierce
Aim of pushing “eject” button
 
But instead trying, the third time, to get it right:
The pearl buttons on my old Liberty of London
Blouse.
 
          No one else to keep me company in the house but sadness:
          The floors tilting, hard to push wheelchair over carpets, hundred year old roof & walls: 
                    library nook that despite age fits just right.
 


TINNED, canned shrimp would be fine
My life book-ended by war:
In between a rich shelf life:
 
In my prime, what I really want is reassurance: it’s path-dependent
I smoked a Swedish cigarette for women
Went out, bought a bottle of stout
 
Got thin
like Twiggy.  Imagined Ziggy.
Imagined wearing a backpack in a wheelchair:
          went to two coffeehouses: one hard, up two steps, had to be carried backward: one easy: there I met you 
          who dropped a literary name: One played to win but other ways you lassoed me; stil do in our eighties: 
                    it’s not over but in late swing, the party over. A rogue wave has come.
 


A ROGUE WAVE may get us
What is the red priest writing, viola? Oboe?
While the red pony rides free
 
I ws on the cutting edg of passion
While the subconscious, that wiley little best, distracted
Attention to the pen which had fallen off the table.
 
The one that got away
Pessimism:
The single gladiola that failed to open its six points yellow as the sun or butter
         This is hostage taking:
`        my joy which ran freely in dawn is now a thin stream of water unable to reflect a thing.



RED PONY & RED PRIEST
                             Illness has a ripple effect
 
 
            “Do we see the future pass over the present’s dusky glass?” Shelley
 
 
TO RIDE horses three-quarter time;
Red ponies flicker like candles across the plain,
The red priest, Vivaldi, comes out of the orphanage for girls, into morning air,    
          score in hand, he is smiling.
 
How to tell
One cold day
From the next?
 
U-turns are difficult
in love. How reframe history….
The tangible, shoe-leather? In transit to Birkenua, Jews dying of thirst reached out, 
          paid for half a cup.
 
Illness has a ripple effect: age twelve to eighty-one: how blunt the pain?
Hospital in childhood, now, Vivaldi, language slips, a rein in age. Pony, how regain?
Listening to the Whiskey Bard smiling, full-throated while the moon is shining
 
I dreamt I was cradled in newspaper: behind the homily, home:
A flat-chested girl again (sitting at our stove turning the 4 dials: blue flame)
A private bitterness. My cheer had dodged a bullet. The disease a gut punch.
 
After they put childhood in the ground
This broken nest inside me singing in bed, wearing my wearing Van Gogh           
nightshirt  curved spine. A sunflower stops me shy of the knife.
 
My favorite dog buried in the yard.
Three friends sat down & wrote songs custom-fit.
I watched the red pony on the screen in hospital, I heard the Red Priest, Vivaldi:  

separating cold day from cold day, the old & the new me: melded what       
served me best, I’d learned to    
knife-fight and not cry.
                                     
 
 
A WELL-NEEDED diplomatic rest
The babe in cradle
Of Ukrainian winter
 
One dimple.
We are on speed dial.
I save every single shred of good news, put it in the bank to magnify a bouquet bedside.
 
One flower is the bride,
One the gate crasher which am I. . .
Imagine a front ender loader taking the top off an egg.
          Be scarified the search for God must rest;
          be refreshed as a silver pitcher, beads of water on its silver breast.
 


WHAT ONE ALWAYS wanted must be shelved
Renew clear-eyed vision
No fraction tires.
 
Judicial writings offer a window into personality
& intellect
Elegance & romantic intensity serve well. If we go thru hard times, soon we will pass a highway sign:
 
At a point of division, we must turn into the divine
Finding its way:
Bus breaks down but no blood is lost, the heaven host
          We continue our conversation
          With the stars, Mathematics floating up, the burning heaven: one sorrow may keep finds its footing.
 
 

IF THIS WERE a godless hour
We would not be breathing
Thru it without every rib hurting.
 
For as long as I live
Every hour is an hour to survive
The lace-work of difficulty to give
 
Any other name but Godded
For in the shadow of lace
Mahogany, oak, birchwood lives you at your dreamlens, me my dreamboard: Lord
          Its gloss
          that mirrors sorrow, mirror it loss converted to gloss
 
 

FRIGID PRAIRIE winter took their lives
Human smuggling
Give us a hold on god, a rope, some we-are-all-linked savior
 
From an ice plunge
An avalanche.
But branch cracks after branch:
 
We cannot stanch our. Thirst
Our throats so parched.
There is willow, there is larch: there is inspiration
          So refugees become human cargo for which fees
          Are extorted. Left speechless, there is still the heart. And in this sword-sharp chill 
                    we must, blindfolded, deaf to storm, find the Lord.
 
 
 
WE WHO WERE once Chaucerian in our brio
Keep each other alive,
One who can walk
 
One who must thrive
On imaginary journsy:
If what we hear is a sign, angelic arsenal, end times feel closer..
 
A dog bats above an aria.
Late Schubert plays, which is young
illness creates a ripple effect; crcles of sea, greenhouse hues
          I wanted to create
          So wrote page after page
          Until in fever te last wave breaking, I knew I wanted to be among the elect.
 


HOOPS
I have leapt thru many hoops: wooden, beige, blond:
Some Brueghel like in that great painting “Children’s Games”
Now with craquelure.
 
The exodus of many hopes
Thru a darkened
Cathedral door. A call to prayer in a small village. Poppy fields blowing. Heroin.
 
The lure of healing
Like the brightness this winter morning, a lst day of a panic year, endemic
Which strikes like an arrow,, the marrow
          Of the bone
          & the pupil of the eye: now green, now grown, now rough rouge like a fox running in fear at a final warning.

Lynn Strongin: The Blues Deliver

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." A chapbook, SLOW DARK FILM, was recently published by Right Hand Pointing.

 
 

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