MOON IN MIRROR Shaker Box, Broom, Clock A Cycle 1. Hollyhock It takes you ten minutes these days to remember the word "Hollyhock." After being sick six ways to Sunday, you have clear eyes. I see the bruised blue vein where the IV was in yesterday infusing scarlet chemicals for hours against lungs filled with tumors which took me back to the planetarium. Kate, all you wanted to return to, like Dickinson, was your carved paper box for poems. A Hinge of paper a shelf of sand. You spoke the purest tongue: Almost Elizabethan. Lost horses dotting your horizon like stray figures......wandered out of the Globe theatre from Shakespeare's time: "Holly" "Hock" Hock a holly, trade in a blue flame while shepherds guard above their questionmarks of canes into the present age taking by the throat the grain that carved the note dissonant dissident. If it takes you ten hours to remember the word for the flower "Hollyhock" I'll cock my ear I'll be listening listening. ------------ 2. Shaker Box, Broom, Clock .."How did a sect so small make objects so sublime?" (Adam Gopnik, "New Yorker, February" "The Shining Tree of Life" 2006) Nob on clock....faces the cult of Box & Broom Docent Trifles make perfections but perfection is no small thing: capsized with that step-daughter of cancers, the lung which the doctors shrug "I told you so" you flee Hurricane Rita to arrive at a sister's in Austin one lung left one child grown one canister of portable oxygen. the drumbeat repetition of the heart objects that look like objects rollcall of ordinary mornings The knock of eggs boiling in a pot A last long echo of the childhood makes you shudder: abused, outcast, girl-child by the barn: echoes sketched by a Seer whom you studied: Blake's drawing: The practicality of it all: the improbablity of your cruel spill you could share with no one: Copper tacks prevent rust an underlying hysteria preventing your taking your life but taking poetry by the throat rather and stroking those mystical gorge-feathers into song. ----------------- 3. Bringing the Tower-Ravens in in crystalline February in London could bode bad fortune is shining over us, and around to all sides like shaken silk: over our poet's imagination.....in the ozone & oxygen: it shimmers in..........cold clear Lenten light of London. the raven master has had to bring the ravens in in mirrory freeze. Tragedy may come overnight upsetting the whole applecart red pippins spileld like coal down the cellar-chute What is raven, what his cold clock ? A birth that unpeeling when memoires of the half-known ...............surface chill and .............. the eye, the mind scrapes like visors...ice from Brueghel's teal. Lady Luck is down on us. Ill fortune is shining over us it shimmers in.........cold clear Lenten light of London. the raven master has had to bring the two, the pair of rosin-gloosy, pitchpine noir ravens in like copper nails rusting from the roof of the tower of London and cage them. ------------------- *this marvelous sequence, MOON IN MIRROR, to be continued in June's Blue House. To enjoy more of Lynn's work, visit~ LYNN STRONGIN: American Poet Main Page This site sponsered by