Lynn Strongin


MEDITATION on CANON & SWANS

     FILL MORE SPICE JARS FOR the one you love
     
“Abide no Hatred”                                                                “I sleep by my vellums”    


LIKE THE BLUE BOWL, somewhere in the line of life things will dissolve
Loss
Like waiting at a defunct railroad station

Will stab us.
Stay us
In the moment

Like great grandmother’s bone corset.
Hold us like a ritual cup of tea
Dissolve like mist
	De mesmerized.
	Realize the blue bow will dissolve in the mist of all we touch, love, know, approach like a 
    	slow-moving train: thru glass, see!



 
HOLD THE CAMERA steady
Lens capturing cityscape
Including canon & swans.

Generational gaps
Difficult conversations with elders.
People are absurd, part of the joy of taking photographs

Gate-keeping. Street photographer.
You are good, to still take care of me: old, a fuzzy haired Colette
Even though Rome was a malarial swamp, we regarded modern Roma.





	holding the mic,
SO HIGH I AM afraid to come down
But storm comes & goes
	Reassuring as my childhood memory of organdy curtains. Sashed in our west 
      
        side city apartment. We overlooked water towers, a touch for us of Camelot.

	We practiced duets. Before supper. A lot.
	Hunger drove us
	Plowed the way for evenings. This the saving connection.
		*

I never held the bowl of mother’s ashes in my hands.
Small as a large lightbulb
The kind we plugged into ceilings. The iron too
	Was true to life.
	Two kids and one woman: the graceful three. We lived in strife, an occasional high so 
        rife with sadness, a laced boot, that I feared coming down. My sadness runs 
        mountain-stream-deep. Honey you love her, let her sleep.


 

SUNDAY’S THE DAY I ASSEMBLE my little pills, she tells me
I take notes
A story

Printed
For clarity.
	Balm serves other purposes like script: the calm pen moving over glossy paper 
        like oil dot over glass.

	Changes at the cellular level, radioactive tracers are another can of worms:	
    	harm does exist
	At time. I rhyme the day away
		My dream world gathers me
		Like pine needles, for the next long stay.




HONEY, YOU LOVE her so let her sleep
It’s like having the jazz stopping,
Your putting the dampers on.

The Labrador puppy. Eagerness
Fades.
	The beat drops, the haze worsens. The world goes dark when you write 
        you are too busy for me. No closed circuit, no partitions for me. 
        Bathed openly. Door ajar. Even with a lover, one wants privacy. . . .

Rope thinning, lichen white fur: well I’ve been waiting my whole life to hold you.
You gotta hold on
Protecting what is left.
	The heft
	Light. But the long night! Honey I let her sleep because I love her, and only her.


 

SYNCOPATION
Everybody protects their own.
My own? My body , my bone

I give up on this life on earth.
With the charm of one addicted?
To what? Now there is a reversal.

Take me outside
In the sun to hide
Will this time never end
	I thought in the hospital as a child
	Looking into briars, the wild crematory-type ash spewing from the incinerator. 
Karen my cubicle-mate died. I wanted to follow her.



 
ANNE;ISA
in a canal house which began three hundred years ago
	where warehouses were on the water: her father had bought the building 
        for his business. Childhood; no fuel do you give me anymore. Only fear.

“Annexes” were built in the back:  space at a premium:
this let more light in.
When we come to the end of time,	 will we find you? I am iron-ore descending to the furnace.

Art in a dark time: hand imprint in wax.
Smudged wall
An unexpected reprieve
	Will it come. . .the tarmac extends far as eye
	After the blue, we drive the lens forward, the projector always playing at the back of the eye.

 


HONEY I LET You sleep because I love you
Among swans & canons.
	Stars, bees, poppies by the rainspout. This is Dante’s anniversary: 
        once what was heaven is now hell.

Since we are both hurting, my nun suggests I go into the hospital.
The final days of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic.
Wearing my big Jackie Onassis glasses,

Calls might roll over from the Jackson clinic
To the new one being set up in New Mexico.
Outside, a protestor holds a rubber baby fetus.
	What is left? To us?
	You sleep, honey, because I love you among swans, canons & the wharf’s almost beautiful rust.


 

SWAN, CANON
	I am hiding things
Always
Hovering over the harm

Long as the day
My right arm
Put my hair up, love. It is long, a French twist, or braid.

All the beauty parlors in my mind
Close; time to talk Tudor
Hiding the hovering fear of age
	Defamation
	Of tenderness goes on all over the world. Be with me, my swan, my canon.


 

THIS TOO will pass
This will pass thru me, this white-hot pain
Thread thru needle.

Cauterizing day
Will become
Sedating night.

I will sleep by my vellums;
Not the first time
But after votives gutter
	The sting of wax guttering,
	Voice lowering, ink glosses, jet, stars hum, bees combed in crystals boxed again.

 


YOUR TABLE’S ready, they just told my sister
To sister.
Over.

I have the fifteen-minute bell in place of curtains.
If tears could bend, they’d be sweat
That blue-blacks at night.

Applause too bends.
Paralysis too has
Its curtain. At the end of a lifetime.
	Meanwhile vellum
	Takes the train to the stage; over to you, breathless soul tight-lunged, 
        waiting in the wings.



 
FROM SAVANNAH to wild horses,
You cannot catch us,
Our love, our steely resolve. Am I walking a thin wire, gray thread

Pearly magnolia
Saltwater marshes.
Sister writes I have so much life to live.

I tell you, sister, today the burden weighs heavy
Iron
Old leather
	Abide no hatred; savannah to wild horses. Blood;
	Rustles with the redbird in the knitted heat, wheat south of my childhood.

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.

 
 

previous page     contents     next page