The Poetry Of.
Lynn Strongin...............
1.
[from Sonnets Extase--contemporary sonnets]
On iron black skewer
Latin students,
roast him.......thumb
hooked in noses at their church-elders up the hill.
The colors are burnt Latin verb. The smell in air of bone roasting, &
flesh rousing songs. Zero at the bone:
burn outer feathers to in
charm smell
like chestnuts roasting.
Medieval red flannel sun setting over white quilted satin.
The hotel
down the hill
where I had the veil skimmed off my eye like cream off milk
is closed:.......all doors bolted
windows boarded
nailed.
In the freeze.
The blood red vial of hummingbird blowing.
White as angel flesh.....the first bite of burned swan.
-----------------
2.
Extase
After a dark night (the soul's),
soldiers with bayonet
This too will pass.
Brass from heaven
in an orphanage:
cross-stitch these.
X's for the infants' boiled marzipan icing
grays
blues...the Blood Forest of Chernobyl
beige
for the elders.
Ebony
platinum
for the heart that prays
.........
further
.........
darker. After a dark night of the soul, extase:
------------
3.
Daylight full in windows:.......yellow paraffin oilskin
white as skeleton, clothesline on which night will be hung by wooden pin.
A velvet tapestry row of trees bleakens: O landscape,
get up
extinguish the lamp
put down embroidery hoop. Clean refill trim lamps. Is our life that
cross-stitched bird on the branch? That schoolhouse log? Have our lives
gone so far from us they can never come back?
One day sky became gray........... as if sun never shone
the road to the north a taffeta grosgrain
unspooled ribbon. Travel to the top of it: ignite cloudbloom.
It's Christmas eve day scant compromising. I see our home as an abandoned
birdcage: no raging light illumines
the lintels. Rain, another of my studies, may flood: Blot up infidelities
of poor listening like black ink.
I too hoped for a weather bomb not to ruin everything:
But nobody can best my telling: This is one of the 1,000 stories. It's dry
in the bedroom. But I live at the center of a provisioning:
Wind is like a smoke smoldering river rising.
---------
4.
Consider Fidelity embroidered...indigo "X"s on sky like where heretics burned
Christmas Eve day:
After all the fuming
Bring Dolly by. A patchwork emotional as sky.
In cold weather, women sat in a circle, quilting, embroidering, sewing. A
wheel against the gray
day.....hearts beating in hopes for a happier marriage, smoother
childbirth, conception for some.
Needlework: a wonder beginning with last fall ones ending with last
fall flowers.
Draw flowers on cloth with pencil
name flowers
call up their brilliance. The greater mystery stands big-eyed in the cold
staring in at us, Dolly.......Arguing's such a love-chiller
After love-locked silence of the household, blood on your fingers from
pricking berries
Toss yourself like a little girl to be hugged.
----------
5.
In a perfect oval, contralto, to catch from the corner of your eye
your portrait on a landscape, Tintoretto, Seurat; Vermeer, Rembrandt even him
egg-shaped
twenty years ago........a score two decades:
You grab the banister
and want to drive your fist
in.
A jab. Come out with splinters: something real.
Instead you listen to "O little one sleep," sung by Kathryn Robyn.
Frustration
is real
a boot-polisher.........an iron hot
poker
this Christmas Eve.
In warmth that answers rejection: continuity, protection.
I do not know myself to be a woman of faith (she thinks.)
A world of poverty & community
closes its circle about me.
Many hands make light work. A little weather-boarded church like
blue-silver down the hill pearls, grays.
*Watch for Lynn's two forthcoming books:
Rembrandt's Smock
Plain View Press, Austin, Texas, due out later this year
The Girl With Copper-Colored Hair (or Chernobyl Apples)
Conflux Press, California, May 31, 2007
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