................................................................................................
The Poetry Of...
Lynn Strongin............................................................
MOON IN MIRROR
Shaker Box, Broom, Clock
A Cycle
.......(continuation of a six-part poem begun in April's issue)
4.
Memoirs of childhood
beggar an axe taken to chip translucent blocks of ice:
ice dust glittering all around.
Child,
Try switching the light on the landing
it may help you see
unbent cities
unbent toys.
Transcendence?............imminence?
Children, Holy Fools:
Lambs of God
are moving in fog:
A sadness rises like white vapor from a duckpond
milky haze:
a tristesse which is....part of life on this globe
loving earth....and knowing one must leave it behind.
O treasury of unfinished lives.
.........Such authority of utterance:
......... such durance.
......... Dying
......... the view of earth is breathtaking
it stabs the lungs:
.........when I was still a stallion
I must have lived in this field;
cattle appear sharp spiked yellow as brass or straw:
they could burn at a matchflame.
.........Imagine Leonardo drawing the skeletal system of the horse:
......... each muscle ripple
......... like satin
His pencil-point secret brings him close................then vision.
Perhaps only the dead are the ones with whom we
hold our truest conversations.
O painter behind glass.
Dry snow & bright wet
streets
gloss:
Sounds rinsed from a bell
like ice from window
like paints from palette
like flames from Hell.
------------------
5.
The steamed silvery bath mirror
ripples like an albino stallion's withers:...............the mink's dish
iced-over
Kate, there is no other lover. And all slips from touch.
Silk slides over the moon.
More salt, more thirst
a brute boon:
Blanding turtle
Rust fox........Musk ox, mark him:
slip over the rim of vision.
Spotted salamanders
in copper dust
swirling tell the time, snow milking over them who
linking magical things:
a grip-slipping fish
the American bittern
camouflaged with silver catkins.................like a silk petticoat
cascading to the stone floor in a moment of passion.
Flesh is all marbled smoke-burns.
The eye
engages
like the mind
which broke the fiery wheel,
Addiction.
Iris unlocks, the violet pupil and globe let go, rods &
cones: , Kate
tall at the window
all 80 lbs.
fighting like Sorra-rail
the bird that generated the expression rail-thin:
Your voice is strong
but the creature is frail: alone:
.........as the reeds it nests behind:
......... There is a vein of tragedy which runs thru your American grain
the lyric
like the blue vein in your temple throbbing.
You are down to 80 lbs. Frost-white floorboards
early Puritan
bleached blouse-linen...cream; bone:
keeps you warn
and the Hope thin as
slatboards you sleep between.
------------------
6.
Moon in Mirror
Buses, ashen bend & bump
along the roadways:
Well-lit bus-shelters keep winter nights bright.
"See Rome & Die"
"Who Keeps you Warm" Angel Fuels
"For Clarity" Island Glazier.
Slogans on trucks for our capital city read
"Chew" The Excavators who Go Deep Down:
like old photographs, tea-stained, curled at the edges,
dog-eared where
Uncle Josh studied his photo in highschool reunion
Aunt Sophie scrutinized hers in another one.
That luminous globe once steam-ironed, pressed in
perfect under glass
now wouldn't pass
muster
by our first grade teacher who checked our gleaming hair for lice.
The photographs are now
wavy like crimped hair..........or like a corrugated scrubbing-board
similar to a roof down south with ocean-waves of flat
silvery tin.
Jim Lacklight...in the street, out the window, drives hie front-end loader
lemon-yellow
one spot of sun
seconds before the sodium lights of night are gone:
his skull in hardhat
his head also covered by a striped awning on the loader
Safe is his brain-pan.
Artists, geniuses run unsheltered to open morning windows.
Simon Pure & Peter Wise jiggle windowframes
and slam them up to morning.
The woman whose memory is quicksand struggles to remember the word "Hollyhock"
the woman with lung-cancer
wrestles to recall one sawn where air came in easily
as sail
boat with chalk-white sail
on a July dawn with the ideal wind
not listing "at irons."
...........................Feather merchants
the white light along the horizon is fear-thin
set for ignition.
We have to keep "radio silence"
while city-palnners read flo-charts
& doctors open closed documents.
It's all about war.
what war does
splits you in half. Cleaves your mirror image from you, an amputation.
Moon in the mirror:
toy in the hand
today fire began sliding like a bead of oil
round my left eye again
fracturing elegant things:
the image of the world
once Max
I can catch in my hands:
I who was a girl with glass-green eyes merely
a sixty-six year old woman
rounding another birthday
knowing that when the heart breaks
it's not a clean break
but every whichway:
like shattered one-hundred year old porcelain
shards of ivory-smooth
Delft
kept in grandmother's cupboard:
butter yellow in morning sun:
a piece of windmill....a thread of blue canal meeting town as town meets sky:
Liquify
yet are fixed under glaze:
The moment before fracturing
I am captured by my eyes:
like Seventeenth Century folk who posed for portraits, caught
in convex mirrors
by Vermeer
genius of the Netherlands:
or Tintoretto, sketcher in oil:
Genius deep, pristine as an Artesian well.
The moon is caught in the mirror
burning perfectly round
in its oils.
I breathe, deep lung-drags of Italian soil
or Flemish sunsets, pale teal.
Once more I am saved
from the marketplace & mayhem
of it all
tainting earth:
being morphed
I catch my image in the catchlight of the master artist's eye
living this incarnation as the poet in the painting:
the girl with the heart-shaped face
& Flemish sea-green eyes, that's me.
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To read more of this remarkable poet, visit~
LYNN STRONGIN: American Poet
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