Lynn Strongin


Two Poems from The Quickening

[untitled]

Dawn, a rose with no audience
The remote is on the fritz.
Other controls falter, water wavers from a spigot then fails 
But what comes is the      flow
A coyote howls
Creosote
The virgin bee hovers near the Queen.
There is ominous light in the sky: the pink barrios are about poverty.
My
Classroom’s window are all afire.
Now petal-by-petal
Day will close            which has been long as a pencil:
Like the rose
Like a woman dancer hair thrown forward over eyes:
What has failed, what agonized
Will rise
Over  landscape
Disciplined as a Quaker.
Over corrugate roves of the pink barrios milkweed blows  light flows.



THE GIRL WHO SWEPT UP SHADOWS

Went about it with talcuumed hands,
Swept gently            then with more speed
Ardor quickening to get the pavement clear of where she & her best friend had done it:
Held hands
Till the beginning of the known world ended:
After this it was glass objects, fire-blown
Which resembled ponies but were unicorns.
After this, paralyzed child
Were made to walk again
First their bodies like water being filmed
But water turning to bones.
She was like the little boy who needed no toy in philosophy café
But found his own:
The silver metal slit in the door      a mail slit
He could put his index finger into, or leaning low clip his nose.
Soon a row of children followed him: given the power
They all made mail come
Smiled
Nail hard boots ready to kick a brother in the shine.
So the girl who wept up shadows
Of having been paralyzed
Grew into the woman
Who whispered to the hollyhock by the barn
How hard life had become:
Cauterization instead of using the bathroom,
Being lifted even to rappel until she found a way to take the whole world
In both hands:
Paralysis, frustration, brown eyes wearing only pullover sweaters, long legs only railroad pants or other:
She swept up the memories of madness      at her situation
Folding them one-by-one to set in the linen drawer
No shadow, no blot on them
But the lovely haunting smell of wood encasing them. “Feel hugged,” she wrote & now did
From loss to lonely climb
From birth to what would be her end: but she’d been shot down, elegant exquisite falcon
Flying higher than the gods could deem.

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.
 
 
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