Lynn Strongin


THE BLUES DELIVER
			For Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam
		An all-nighter during war. . .while Louis Armstrong plays




THAT OLD TRAIN keeps rolling down the track. The radio delivered news from the front 
          while the blues delivered. . .
Kansas City, Muskogee:
My past, my last life X’d out. Hidden child. Hungry. Tired.

Hello, Springfield.
Casey Jones was a marvel man
But now he’s in the promised land.

In biker’s jacket, meeting a member of a holy family
When I was a child rocked by sorrows in the south
Even then, I drew a fiery line between freedom & oppression.
	This paralysis: only my lover knows what its done to me:
	Hidden child, lover: only the deep down blues deliver.



 
WHEN I WAS a child bent over newsprint by lamplight during war
The ripples war makes in bone
The baby in a laundry basket breathing milk bubbles

Corrugating it
Like anvil sheet metal.
And you so close to me in the next room. You girl curled up like a pearl.

Newspapers making a tent between my parents, at two a.m. table before he trains back to head-
          quarters. Blues play, they deliver.
Smoking wainscotting-brown the air became between
Coffee, an all nighter they pulled they know what rings each other’s bells. They clash.
	But after all, they were in their twenties
	Now survivors of an extinct war, I turn pages with dry eyes in doll’s war museum.


 

IN MY SMALL war-museum, my bed
Crutches in closet
Wheelchair folded

Recalling rattan of childhood
Still undamaged
Skin like peach fuzz, bruiseless flight to ground, feather-weight

Now you know what paralysis is;
Water where nothing blue gives
Forth wake
	Pain where sensation proves
	Life, desire for freedom where no rope gives, to rush, to leap whereas in the grave no muscle moves.

 


WHY BE NOSTALGIC for the south
When it’s where sorrow plays
With light like a boy’s thru a girl’s hair? My exhausted beloved, taking care of me.

What mournful Ukrainian tune
Could express this: here comes a breathless voice, dig a tunnel to Poland.
Imagine running a small shop near a fuel storage area, Chernobyl.

Rucked up sweaters straightened.
I ran back for Mrs Muffin-face as a child for comfort. My sweet spot.
Moods that do not lift:
	My southern half, no, less than half riffs
	On paralysis: the fog of it dispersing: the way rope-beaten I am still rising.




A TREAT to have a breather, an episode free from pain:
It’s back
A blue cloud crying DOLL

At sixes and sevens
With heaven
Leaven

Bread out of baker’s oven.
The shape of water changes
While fragile peace is talked about, comes
	Near, like blue-gray sea. Lace collar
	You first came into focus for me, a color on my body, of lilac sea.


 

THE TRAIN SLID down a mountainside
Transportation safety board
Found it was due to degraded braking performance. Transparent. Thirteen-year-old died.

My fear is up permanently
Antennae
When there is nothing left in your background to save you from this sorrow

Complicated redemptive art;
The older we get the more tenderness we have
	The train sliding down, transplanted child, dark thistle grove
	Transparent love.


 

MY EXHAUSTED beloved,
Carry on 
Because blues deliver, courage comes

Cities, daughters, dreams, immigration
The news has stopped my heart once more:
Propaganda goes those organs of fallen soldiers are being harvested.

“Your mother has a certain expression—one of longsuffering” 
A helper said of our mother.
Every move toward kindness camouflaged: I frame 
	Night-after-night, day-after-day, in our Bohemian, little Soho
	In age, having landed, no longer an alien we push thru, our needs less transparent, 
              trying to get over: blue. Framing survival with love.


 

YOU ARE AN AMBER member
While there is an exchange of prisoners
Many women

In besieged Ukraine
War blunts every nerve
& Neuron. Throw out the old tea, raspberry birthmark in twilit dark

We live on
Nourished by bread
Water, the memory of a daughter.
	Don’t ask me what’s going on in the blue hills younder:
	Will we ever reach younger, amber member, while across the ocean there are starved prisoners?

 


Bootcamp, hospital 1951

THE UNIMAGINABLE becomes the unforgettable
The moment deserves to be understood
A volunteer teachers organizes childrens’ games underground: for five weeks

They have lived this way.
Wrenching, revelatory
Cerulean melancholy.
		*
This wasn’t intended as exile
The horse with star-splash in his forehead
Stood next to blaze;
	I remember that box of water; the 12-year-old living in it,
	Barefoot in boot camp. Hospital-gown, no hoodie; trenched, no blood.




“This includes a soul, the silky part . . .” Mary Oliver

REACH DOWN to the silky part of the soul.
There is a that sweet spot.
Filling the hands with mist. The city in my head is very sad. The pear’s “Luster of survival”

Watching a bird fly off. Silence is broken in half.
Sunset last night looked like forever, transistioning
These structures upon sky

See from end of the suite on the other angle?
Who is on the other
Side? It would be holy to have release..
	Unanswered.   All men will be sailors: one small woman standing against the sand. My beloved 
	going thru patches where I go with her hand-in-hand. Beyond.

 


WILL YOU EVER LOVE ME as you did before?
I am a cracked Vietnamese pitcher
With almond eyes

Will we re-take steps to ardor?
Born on a rice farm outside Saigon
The gift to be simple, like water ran thru my outstretched palms.

Threading fingers.
The box of water that was my twelfth summer
Glimmered: the silk of the soul
	Your voice gentle as wind chimes.
	Never whines. Will you be by evening in the emergency room? Will you ever love me 
              as you did before, again?

 


AM I A NIGHT Gardener who has ceased to understand world?
I reach for the silken part of the world
An olden child

From nine years on. Buckeye muse. Particular voices.
I pull away from the wounded area
Retreating, curled up.

Crystallize delicate ground
This love defines us
Angelus. 
	Ice in April
	The fearing gaze of a sick child. Vindiction of love. I do not understand this world.
    

 
 

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