The Poetry Kit |
| Lynn Strongin | |||
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WORLD WARD II
(again for Cassandra & Suchoon in thanks for listening)
© December 2006 Lynn Strongin
CONTENTS: PART ONE: Prince Ishamel, Caspar Hauser Saint Francis on a Disc of Snow Sometimes, you get really Blessed Once, I wanted to go home again Little Bird Divisible Street Caspar Hauser I Caspar Hauser II (“where there is no nerve there is no altar) Wick The Patience of Iron of God Mullioned Window When one chopstick is longer than the other Thin windows in children’s prison Fold-after-fold Nerve Pain & Tallow No Fears Team can Iron A Scythe in the Bone
PART TWO: World Ward II Stop at the White Iron till Steam Triangle Cools Our Breaks, Blunders Hunger Took me Out Wick North & South “You Can Touch my Wings” Stained Glass Quilt World Ward II
PART ONE: Prince Ishamel, Caspar Hauser
Saint Francis on a Disc of Snow
A wood drawer slides open in the iced house: Icicles drip from stone: snow covers porch ceiling albino like bone: & it is still falling, whirling in an updraft, lifting as mother will soon:
If anyone from hydro is listening, our submarine cables are frozen.
(Soldiers do not write often of war children of ward- life.)
I would not trade my life with anyone. Listening to Mahler.
When death solves the insufferable dilemma of our mother’s life, will she not
rise feather-after-feather stayeth off death, pinion under sing Pure oxygen working for her in place of lung breath, that sombre minion, mission?
Sometimes you get really Blessed
Pewter-light spins a halo-plate: a closure of desire: winter sun’s bluish a wheel & a mother is released a shaft at a time
Rub your two hands together like blocks of wood: ignite sparks.
Encouraging a sense of forgiveness & healing she does not know if she’s ready: flakes whirl on a stack of snow, then eddy: she reaches up for more water asks will any love her now (snow owl drifts in on silent pinions): then her hands let go stainless silent as bone-marrow.
Once, I wanted to go home again
Before snow, came frozen rain, a forty-year magnolia tree was bent & broken. Snow-Shut-down compass-drawn circles of silver icicling, measuring the perfect round eternity to step thru & on as onto an airstrip: One war’s done: A new one comes millennial: Airfields spin blue cannon Snow-plants Munitions-plants appear botanical from jets: air letters go— The Little Ice Age glows sheer unrefutable Fate: First holds erect on stilt like poles, ccopper-wires leans Before the water once again seals over, makes it bend in.
Little Bird, root-grubber in planter dig on:
dream maps you design. Radio Head I’m
a sombre color
While others tunnel thru ice this will suffice:
I travel 360 degrees on one dot fixed on reverie terrain: We have always lived on Division Street: You going out tall, might & mane: me staying home in the brandylight, with the potted ferns & the heat By force of Fate—if no heavenly plan.
Divisible Street
One of us keeps watch till icy dawn the rose on the vest I wear burning open against gunmetal heaven.
My other stands watch keeps a vigil early years in Yugoslavia swirling metals on blood sky span: watching, wearing quilted down
When I blink awake watch- fires in clouds beyond cannon burn red exchanged for dawn not an earthly but an otherworldly scarlet crimson dawn I reach with my finger, translucent under fingernails burn blood moons.
Caspar Hauser I stabbed to the heart appearing in Nuremburg’s town gate, bleeding thru his quilted vest of roses
could not be more alarming than hours are now: iron doorknockers on Eternity.. Beyond the trees
from bed she see red sky piercing eyeball Weather bomb over the River Charles.
“What is wrong/” I ask knowing there is no way we can move the clock hands back on the heavy Gothic Town Clock
to the hours when we played with red wood toys, dolls, clothespins before a white window.
Grotesque, the two clock hands of beaten metal: forever kiss, a twisted kiss: conjoined twins not lovers, Leonardo Da Vinci airport behind, locked in their glacial bronze.
Caspar Hauser II
Where there is no nerve there is no altar
Where there is no nerve there is no altar: What nearly killed me seventeen years ago didn’t even graze you
compressed breast in metal.
An Asian man wants to carry me around in a velvet room.
* Phoned the butcher for Christmas turkey. He’d had a flood over wood sawdust-shined floor. The locker wasn’t well sealed:
blood mixed with water was dripping into the shop below:
A quilt & dollhouse shop.”Nightowls” I cut our connection. Blood in a dollhouse.
Isolated in snow-globe, I’m hearing waves lap, then freeze, thinking of Prince Ishmael.
Theatre? The thrill of getting it right or wrong in public.
Flood. Bone & Gristle: God or Mammon: Where there is no altar, there is no nerve There never will be one.
Wick
You have a past as lovers do. Wick. An ice-light in the sky.
Everything I cannot do I’ve severed, or accomplished by muscle, Imagination.
In a building beyond time in circumstances nobody could understand:
Surviving has its own pain.
Mother? Her aid “hides” around the corner of the “L’” shaped room
“L” Not for love but for lost
Her daughter, her golden-girl half a year in a dusky ward: drawer to be slid out: all the instruments botanical plants ashen.
Let’s face it: She’s flammable, socketed: She is down to the wick & has no past as lovers always do to look thru proud: ancient oval mirror slightly swinging, candle-lit.
The Patience of Iron, of God
She rides the cutting rim of pain with precision of a Swiss Army Knife: incisive, frightening as anything that won’t quit. Exacto.
Bearing before me girlhood like head of St John on a platter
or early childhood years: like a Chinese toybox
an albino candle in the pre- ward handful of years walking:
post-war time. (Hitler & Himmel hobnobbing across the ocean.) Hummer’s feeders in our winter porch hung
liquid ruby, crimson in the crystal cold: The Glazier rolls past, chains on his wheel hitting rock-crystal ice: Black ice. One cuts with an Exacto knife: One life will suffice.
Mullioned window
Plate Glass “Cambridge Antiques” holds a rocking chair spilling with Steif toys: black sheep, bears, chipmunks with glossy bead eyes blaze.
The shopkeeper is a woman who pads, black stockinged feet on red. I’m not a woman
in wheelchair & mock-fur but a girl-child fifty-five years before here: in a children’s ward stretching for white light, piercing shaft: no toy, but flute’s dark loss to play, gloss to kiss song from agony.
The original little red wagon has become a classic in continuos production for over 70 years, an American toy industry record. The Classic Red Wagon is the largest steel wagon and features an extra long handle for easy pulling. The durable steel wheels with real rubber tires offer a quiet ride. The no pinch ball joint and the no scratch edges keep finger safe from harm. A no tip turning radius prevents tipping.
When one chopstick is longer than the other it’s hard to grasp rice. When one leg’s longer than the other you trip on ice
which slips beneath the feet. For my thirteenth birthday I got new rods.
In photographs we tried to disguise my wheels: I was a girl
not porcelain but pearl:
No steel & wood “Radio Flyer” ball joint & no-scratch edges rather
crutches Sister Kenny had designed: my world off-rhymed, slant, harsh.
I looked up Hacksilver: “Medieval scrap silver melted down for recasting.”
Hammerstone: “Bolt, button, clasp, cloak fastener. The first wheelchair was wood it had scant grasp”
One Dark Sabbath slip of the lip cost the cloth, the life failure of hasp.
Thin windows in the children’s prison lit one amazing save: brown-yellow as old nicotine Russian grandfather’s lung-love
thin as isinglass slices of Slavic black pumpernickel bread.
We kids--our prize came in ribbons of steel
Hard to wrap our minds around: We went to sleep
in one cell woke in another one
going on radar, illness a blip on the screen Such our transport our transportation:
Fold-after-fold of linen
wrapped me as girl-child. Wild nights.
Feral, foxfire noons lit my tongue
Failed-after-failed virgin:
love wrapped me as woman.
I learned to roll my narrow cell keep rolling:
Indigo child
into a ball to pummel world, now flat, now rounding.
Nerve Pain & Tallow (polonium 210)
The radiation people.
“Depend-a’dor” rolls past. . .as I wait at the bus shelter J’s wife has undiagnosable nerve pain.
This nerve pain--It comes from another world it seems just when she thought she had found God.
The poisoning has left a cloud floating above Anglo-Russian relations. The bone marrow is dissolving no more white cells all hair is gone trembling ensues. Brother Donkey is half done.
At the bus-shelter a woman chatters about the “Royal Wippineg Ballet” “Emory” the blue heron cranks over. American textbook letters loom in cumulous clouds & mare’s tails.
Up the hill & down the hill: North side covered with ice shell--hell the great unwashed
floating in a cloud: South side whistle-clean blue ice.
Tallow for Saint Tom. (The last Chinese Take-in we got was done in wax.) the sides of the candle contain globules maps of deformed lands: the flame spits: the nerve-man comes, arrows to target whom? Nerve-pain & Tallow-Candle-Hill slid white against the night are melting.
We live only in this box of bones drawn by a string of air: jaw to footbone: A wrinkle which cannot be ironed out comes..
You tell me of the “vestibule” in your childhood: I tell you of mine a delicious collection of little things: roots in jars, rusty nails, antique buttons; hungry for intensity driving the tongue into the socket:
These many eroded things, small, charm: stone porches with glass rubber gloves, old iron rakes, rusted, Radio flyers. Delicious cream in the cold coffee December first. The radiation people are flying under Leonardo Da Vinci clouds Moscow to London.
Eggshell-springbells wind round & round the great unwashed rising in albino towers in my dream: Still another wrinkle develops
The very difficult final years return an eggsheen gloss covering them: Natural & supernatural fears cannot be steam-ironed
Faith, we have none: That cloud from the iron’s another disease rolling in.
A Scythe in the bone to feel the marriage slip away sand quicksilver When you came to me my rehab was still locked in place from childhood. Now slipping its lock & bolt, geographies in sandgrains. But oak, polished lectern the books: and above all, the two sons endure-- are carved in stone.
PART TWO World Ward II
Stop at the White Light, A sale of ancestors’ relics are piled in orange crates.
at a wayside where are burned tires to keep blood warm:
Carbine flare: Old Joanie doll from our knotty-pine first-floor landing.
“I want white toys for my mice for Christmas” said the child.
In a forest of felled oak branches tables are piled with old snow as for a feast outside a restaurant a site diners have abandoned.
Stop at the black stair: Go at the green. Stop at the white
the string plucked the goods stacked the song sung.
In Medieval cold wearing colors of the Middle Ages I look up again stop on a dime:
A cloud wrapped the feathers I don’t find God. Instead, Sabbath Snow aisles of emotion constricted, narrow: instead drained emotion of Low Bone-marrow.
Iron till steam-triangle cools
Affection may flourish at the sweep of a pen then be flattened.
School wax & wane. Strike till you’ve had things out harsh & bright
with God: Then strike till the light is white the songs get brighter as the dark crystallized:
My twelfth summer glazed to stone urn: filled, not with grains of sand,
but afterburn ashes of the best girl I’d ever held in my arms.
(for Cassandra, on reading about your childhood) Our breaks, blunders
The cracked teeth blown out of my mouth from a fall on marble when a crutch slipped at age thirteen Dante, a sapling, fur on the upper lip. Beauty is in the breakage of porcelain.
Mirrors cannot lie. We can roll them away backswing them
give me back the story of long legs taking hills
the way the army took the girl, like taking back the soul, on judgement day.
Cannot you see
when they rolled me into the ward I scrolled down the list of wrongdoing, my tongue began:
“I am a child. I don’t belong in a grownup ward”
It was then, dazzled, & dazzling them: like a tumor fear was growing alongside ecstasy?
No I never found God but how prove
he didn’t’ find me? I found a tree from fork to topmost branch rocked oceanleaves, observed
the way a suburban road dropped away
a ribbon from a bonnet no longer necessary, like knees & hands & a pew, to pray.
The girl learns to sway: the boy’s stalk grows stronger every day.
What dropped was hope with the mercury
sealing silver garrets & all I had to say. I was becoming odd.
Attic & orchard turn into a mystic’s sanctuary.
You ran with your dogs I ran with my gray
companion, melancholy. Later, impatient with orthopedic device & my infirmity.
Up north an exile a refugee—voluntary—I see:
After snow man & woman tremble forth
fragilely like man & woman from the Swiss clock house: the sundial says Hour Zero “Mystery.”
Downeast beauty is in Mother’s old robe, iron-blue which she wiped her hands on after doing dinner dishes
till the hips were worn with holes. Now she has an ache in hip socket & palpitations. She bore two boys. Homely beauty’s is in the box for Salvation Army.
I take my genius to the garret & try
pen & paper dotted Swiss organdy, frayed, throwing shadows on the mirror’s other side.
Roughclad saints find bliss in The 40 MPH sign turned upside-down by snowstorm beauty in the swan as in the wren’s eye. My disfigured teeth. And when you die & when I die we will enter the Iron Hour: Eternity.
Lynn Strongin December 2, 2006
Hunger took me out
Hunger took me out: drove me home Thirst keeps me soldiering.
You climb into a tall four-poster bed. You are a child. A moon full as a bowl of candle oil
A small person surrounded by large persons with huge shadows
your blond tool-kit your wit: feet knit path to school & home from it.
Lutheran Swede drawn between harsh & tender God, shaded by church-going.
Phrases that must never leave one: You write an extraordinary poem to push the wagon.
Hunger is a cart of children.
Cold is driver of the pure. * How dare write of final hours? This earth’s scary: this is no home.
I’d run catch the lash of pain.
(Everybody has a shape & current a depth & shallows.)
When the ultimate hour comes, Will you be walking one of the dogs? a smooth & one a feathered one? Bred to run & shine.
It is amazingly small town the world: born into.
Three White hens, shepherds, & the lullaby-person.
Woods reflecting fireplace flames, face reflecting emotions oval mirror framed reflecting emotive face, the four-team of feelings:
It goes in smoke in snow
tall to the reality you know vulnerable.
Artists live in history which none can touch.
Gunmetal bronze falcon
like rooster on the weathervane:
Organdy bedroom curtains luff out & in:
one so hard one comforting Love has long been the leading line such that you drink it up as from a cup.
Wick aliveness. Mystery deep as ever: I want to wake & shake sister to say for half a century I have lived in half a body.
Translucent Mozart plays.
No more gnarled night than when I realized I was paralyzed.
Slowly, like crystals it dazed:
Lustrous events: flicker the wick wire, fire higher & higher.
Sweet Jesus & Harsh God rock me: At the rim of language, I plunge in: Deeper & deeper:
Spoon sleep: air settings.
A change from life into eternity. Then,
Our great dignity’s tested by death I mean our freedom. To set one’s foot blissfully out of this world when the 'parting of ways comes.
(last three lines are a paraphrase of Thomas Merton)
North & South
You live downSouth. I live upNorth.
Dixie’s riddled with superstitions colander the bayous:
I wear a black dress as Emily wore white: She color of dawn Me of night. Both epiphany. An ecstatic child, birthed in melancholy whose horizon was Eternity.
“You Can touch my wings”
Peacocks in Ice
Today first Sunday of advent Sabbath after ice storm See one bedraggled peacock one peahen not behind bars but on a jagged fence
in Beacon Hill Park, closed at the height of the storm: outside the children’s zoo: beyond bars on wood fence his cobalt frozen
her olive-greens shimmering. At close range. Statuary. Sanctuary.
I recalled disparate things Little windows lighting up in peacock’s eyes: my late beloved who couldn’t tell a lie. Next the boys stringing fairylights above meatfreezers at the market
then the child playing an angel who said “if you’re gentle you can touch my wings.”
Last Swedish girls all blonde & Lutheran in Florida candles in their hair for Noel.
“Take then off. Blow them out!” I warned the girls. “You could catch fire.” They smiled, bland angels on Christmas cards.
They went out into the wild Southern night blackout on horizon. replaced by ward children who burn for all time: Honored past language we yearn for the fire-born, for what loneliness cannot repair with speech for things beyond.
Stained Glass Quilt
Circleville, Ohio: (Ohio, Japanese for good morning.) Bet has done a stained glass quilt design:
“leading” made hand-dyed her first attempt at stained glass
My first attempt at crutch walking I held handles like glass rails:
dark as leading in Chagall’s Jerusalem windows: parallel bars, my fist of nails.
World Ward II i. Iced Peacocks: after the world war Black dress. remind me of the year in the ward. No homesickness.
We were flesh with souls, we were firefox: Paraffin with lamps:
We were spines with cut connections.
Telephone poles with no wires between.
We slept in cots, clip-boards at the end spelling likely fate: we could spy on one another. We glowed after the master switch was thrown we had swallowed radium
This children’s military insulation was high on a high near West Point. We were wakened up at five a.m. icy cold aluminum bedpans slapped on bony buts, the paralyzed wounded, called by last names:
blue blocks of frozen feet toes waving, or paralyzed: flag of spirit flung.
Mercury dropping soldiers rarely talk of war of death, ward-children.
Yearning to be with other kids intensified: consummation.
The soil in Europe was still smoking. *
Why do I return & return? To kiss them on the cheeks, to say goodbye to them.
We learned the quick grab from the older kids & on stairwells on plinths, smoking. Taking deep lung-drags in Reese jackets.
Maps of streets leading to brick primary schools: schoolrooms smelling of vanilla, butterscotch blond floors, snap-maps of Italy glossy clay-based papers scrolled down enchanting: maps of Ireland
woven, inlaid brick in our temples with the blue veins.
Such pride as the Head Matron’s could simply step down fueling us. Farmable airplane lighter. Corners, night agony, tucked in sheets.
We could have a nightmare sleep bookmarking dream: still triumph in day. On shoulder-wheels, Stryker frames.
The Brothers Betrayal Body & Soul fisticuffing:
Sixty years later body memories of the ward return:
links, braces, couches, buckles, hosts aids
edges scrolled with these. But illuminated the sides of the Medieval manuscript however, one nurse’s love.
Renaissance: Rembrandt. I am old. .I am carved with sleep’s geographies
eyes still green but more opaque after two cataract milkings. A clarity is gone
yet more clearly than ever these lands return:
the buckets of dawn the military salute of matron.
The Fifties: soup for lunch two New York girls
from eastern European background Mittel-Euroepans
one on crutches one with violin bow home for lunch from P.S. 87
A chorus of Holocaustal voices came home with you, little sister.
ii.
How do a sketch for a Botticelli? Color is necessary. I was a twelve year old with budding Botticelli
Primavera Pear-shaped breasts now the issue of desire.
The scar-tissue of fire rended.
Lilacs in a doorway ended.
The way I sat on the edge of the bathtub when a girl walking
folded like the ironing board
you can touch my wings if you are careful.
In white sequins dancing in a porcelain bathroom.
Wanting to be riding the rim of a city in a bus: embracing the crystal teal close & far from folk again
Which city would I chose? Montreal? Plattsburgh
those god-forsaken hamlets. iii.
Grosgrain Sunday followed by winter Monday:
These four walls this ribbed sweater.
Had you had daughters instead of sons you might have dressed them in grosgrain ribbons, ink blue.
iv. Pippi Longstockings at age 11 now 21:
is off to Germany for winter vacation the hazel-eyed & long-limbed
from shipboards clean as chalk in old Cape Cod
Will she land in Munich? or Frankfurt, a pool of murky metals.
What if earth’s burnt black brown & beige?
Making dazzle out of music.
Grosgrain ink blue ribbons, bowler hats gone into the Seine, the Hudson.
A writer of 67 hands cupped around coffee mug in Schraft’s I blow smoke-rings
round the age twelve: to be 12 again, Ballerina, hospital child.
When you have two children there are many ways they can blow your cover.
Aunt in her mock lambswool jacket over the typer
you never asked a question of her what it was to be a child, post-polio, strapped on a tilt-table elongated by atrophy to a Giacometti
those years you were the cream of the crop
winter Monday: hours long as the torso of a dancer light short, December An Ember
Your waist was cinctured as my neck might have been by the loop of the iron lung.
v I too have a flair for gossip long days papered with memory
violets in a dormer ceiling flooding down
to my feet the gown I never wore.
Firebox Firefox the girl flies over the land which firebombed our kin.
When my longleg braces were buckled on did I dream of being a swan?
No child to raise, I scan catalogues of grosgrain: standard, striped, polkadot
then close the album.
These four walls. Iced peacocks. Black dress
Caress: flying under Leonardo Da Vinci skies Canadian early December afternoon
sepia sunlight catching corn like a fork neatest farmlands this side of Holland
Afternoon pale brown as matzo, the burn-folds in it golden:
An iron boat stands in a window reflecting like my half-smile, Mona Lisa: Where will an iron boat sail on, what waves command? spinnakers reflected in cobalt windowpane?
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