Lynn Strongin
FOLD
On Palestrina Street with a roof above the bus-shelter of old elms & cottonwoods,
family life imploded like old chrysanthemum:
infrastructure of old cavils flaking like ancient paint peeling.
One of the fold not one of the fold black sheep,
I tread on old silver:
After death, I figured there’d be time for lace: one can stash away Irish linen sharp as copper: what an improbable combination.
Eerie as a tin whistle our daily lives of omens, hauntings.
I began keeping a vigil when I was young: Black engine.
fire-heart:
Awake, at a crossroads, long after sleep should have come: watching till eyeballs burn:
Jacket Slate & light factory its
Knock-off time:
voices shut valves about me final touches of sun paint the rim
of town: the hope & the glory word-for-word our fury & famine bright as radium rods
ring the changes like a glass box locking things in during nightwatch for safekeeping.
CHINESE LUNCH BEFORE MAMMOGRAM
Yesterday in King’s English you spoke over Chinese lunch.
Outside, sweetness of spring. Would they get it all? Or leave some in, for luck?
You walked as though you might break something:
egg, icicle, or star.
at night you dreamt
you stumbled on
an abandoned theme park.
Now it’s the right breast:
it has crossed to the other shore
ghostly on this mirror morning.
O gram
To keep a clear head weighs a ton
white mirrory air reflecting nothing
absolution, nothing
your head goes out the window
break
leaving on glass
a scrim.
Forty years ago 2 teenagers
a boy a girl
whom you’d borne into the globe didn’t believe your wounds: Life wore a different uniform.
GHOSTLY
The glass ink bottle blossoms black. Talent is the Genie.
Jewish kids in milk-city Mid-century
we learnt our Brahms bent with scoliosis over keys
The language of the enemy was Saxon, time-keeper, soul burner:
the ground in Europe still smoking.
but this was music.
Our mirror images
in Poland, Germany were
photographs burned, match-lit, disembodied:
first shoes,
then kneecaps
then features eaten up one-by-one by flame. This was evil, the supernatural.
Smoke children took shape
sculpted by flame & wind.
HAUNTINGS III
Our precarious lives
we balanced like trays
reminiscent
of lit red villages in Hungary or Poland
foretold by Torah:
like our birth defects & wounds:
Thousand & thousands
while Old Inkpots barks the worst fire of all outside our ward the world
on his icicled chain:
First we lose sight, then torso, then limbs
wraiths, clutching (like dying child a straw) our otherworldly dream.
Copyright © Lynn Strongin
home
