Poems by Lynn Strongin

T SHIRT WITH APPLE JACKS (for dear D.)  I’ve never felt like hollow in my throat from a play or something before. I look at Mum. I can see her face in the dark watching them. I want to tell her about my throat but I don’t know what to tell (Eliza Minot, The Tiny One, p. 101) 
The Summer after our mothers both died (The Girlfriends)  We cleaned house. Wore bandannas, did high kicks watched “a soap with a difference”
Meer-Kat Manor. I booked us a matinee “Anything Goes”
 Childhood paradisal terror      flickered from corners Although fire crackers began quietly to explode  In the corner From the kitchen The bright lemons.  Tour de France Was on. Re rented “The Triplets of Belleveille again.” Listened To Harry Winston "Winter," Brubeck, July jazz  My blood pressure dropped radically. Winnipeg is Here & aboriginal art floated into celluloid colors on the scene  a boy floated fourth of July rubber duckies  we watched the light bounce off them. Woman gardener, my beloved hand in yours, love, removed umbrage: Made the huge rose Of our grief  You sprang out of the drabness of the rape, anonymity for safety Into Color! O my dear gal, uncowled nun, fox made friends with lamp  Fox who nibbled Open Into the mall:  Printed towels, T shirts with “Apple Jacks” a shower curtain with “Boutique” on it. “elegance, le nouveau parfum feminene.”  We printed air For the first time in our shared lives I, the elder, cooled the temple of our grief  Father  The doctor once, long ago had done With rose blankets. We were after all gypsies, Rosenblums.  Bought a little nite lite shaped like a tea cup Made in Japan Lit the bathroom.  The folk in the building did not see you as my assistant
but as wonderful nineteen twenties flapper friends with bobs, long gold cigarette holders, a kicked back high heel, romancing the home. We began the day with a kiss. I touched your small pear shaped pearly breasts With rose nipples  And dressed you in designer sleepwear Striped bottom low cut top.    Hang gliders overhead, noise form the airport far away.  You even bought Gloria Vanderbilt jeans On discount At Zellers.
The summer after our mothers both died We swept home Cup-hooked up the new shower curtain The Fragile X child Spazzed out On the avenue socking her grandmum the gut. A melt down at evening.
And the terms “Flax”          “Hackle” “Candle molds”  (reap hook, a sick for cutting wheat) Entered our vocabulary, sat on little schoolroom chairs, swung feet, stayed. Even a grain cradle With a two-tined fork for wheat & with a wooden rake  I tap your top, that nubile tip of the Botticelli body, crisp as water melon Big Grained farm words came out of our rosebud mouths. I bought “The Canterbury Tales” complete & unabridged With the pilgrim Riding horse, preaching a lesson to the gentle          Beast on cover. We loved, we had grieved. It was not unexpected         They had gone into the good night         Complicit as lover.                                 It was, as the green heat bloomed & the most radiant         Scarlet sunset ever         Pure lit scars         It was over.            Done. Had Come. 

 I came back, tried to learn more about my past

 girls in white stockings, a cloud of virginity silvering them: In oval portraits stepped out of their frames, their leopard dot flames.  Carrying  A scrap of glass Like a rag from a rag curl, or a teddy bear’s blue ribbon.  After mother died, The top to her Russian lacquer box Malachite wouldn’t fit right: the Russian princess’ head  Came loose. The children shriek like geese Or monkeys outside  Curtsied. Postcards from the sky. The “A” train.  Tonic. Jazz. Everywhere music takes you. The Fuse.  In summer, divorce, we put rubber to the road Salt Lake City Was such a relief, bathing in the buoyant salt at dusk, grape dark rain.     Wood Pond 
 Green-eyed, unwounded, sandy-haired, tomboy in 3rd grade Given a plank of wood To plane into something a shelf, a cutting board?
 I just kept sanding it over & over, it never broke to give me splinters. Till veins of darker gold stood out: They were little ponds, O look at them.  People lived on the sides of them. When hemo was so low They thought I had a bleed  It wasn’t. It was an infection. I’d rather wear schoolboy’s duds, weeds.  Midsummer White blouse Blazer, tie. Nose bleeds go with choir practice.  Than go with summer’s laxity.         Back to Wood Pond:         The people are living inside, lighting little lamps nightly         Breaking bread, spread with butter, eaten with hope, in morning, a real village buried two-hundred years Unearthed Surreally daily.   Staff 
 All my Belgian friend’s trouble with staff Selling Belgian lace  Reminded me of the staff Of life  Bread. How the marriage bed had sailed out to sea on her  (How stop the glottal-stop of grief?)  Yet Throttled, a skinny banister of hope to lean on left  Her two children Stayed in her ken.  Holes in the lace       eyelet  (the brass keyhole thru which she could glimpse her tragic catholic past) Holes in the marriage--scars         Thru which sky, bright as water, pours in.  
 It had to be a boy’s T-Shirt leaves bright electric glinting, sky a flat pewter plate dropped by our mother, 
 I wheeled in Triumphant home from the doctor.  No bleed. Apple green. Jacks? Why they? A popular breakfast cereal. Kellogg’s. Good morning.  Rain clouds Mass Up sky  The workmen Have built a tarp room Between our building & the dumpster: O birth of container city  The duration Of summer The durance: Then unsocketed, like a Christmas tree pulled out of its pole will wilt, die like the transplanted trees.  O blessing Over the parched wheat The dry pools of silos which could explode like oil drums.  Rapture Again Comes.  Arms spread wide in crucifixion In cock crowing, brass orange: I know the joy. I know It had to be a T shirt.         A boy.

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Lynn Strongin