MOVED TO . . . 
Lynn Strongin

     

I.
Moved to a town whose streets bore Fuel & Mineral Names:
Coal   Silver  Lead   rising like ocean but desert    high mountains rule-straight horizon burning off day's heat & fatigues.

Litmus nightfall         took our moods
  A cappella for a donkey's age                                   I sang alone:
eating a small WingFat rock cornish game hen        from mainland China.
Hours piled upon ingots, fused gold during nights, liquefying, melting into cinders of dawn.

I moved for a number of reasons:
Mother Writing           pain.
Religion         which I wanted to be calm & clean as an Amish chair, harpback wood, painted ivory.

There were my possessions:
Piled high crates of wood:     they caught the fire of sunset.
           If I have not been a good sister & daughter during life,
           Perhaps I will be after death.

From that altitude, I saw, like mica,  layers of family pain
           ripples of ocean rolling in
           strata of blue ridge mountains in old negatives
           weathered                   whitening
           to porcelain:
Strife harnessed my energy again & again.

II.
Corresponded with a woman crossing the land wearing Oxblood Chukkas   but she never came.
Moved
Carrying letters from Brush Creek, Missouri which trickled to a thread.
The steel rail used to carry us home.
My desk the Nazarene.
I wanted to take life by the throat.
Wanted to conquer the alphabet
wrest a poem
a drop of water
from a desert fountain.

III.
In the city whose streets were beaten goldleaf-thin,
married a girl people took for a Catholic,      a former nun
 knocking over the netsuke in the hallway with her kimono sleeve.
The translucent flesh of an iris unfolding.

Immigrating North,                we were wound in red tape    mummified in crimson:
Visas              health certificates       registration
Wearing my Irish jacket "Examiner #9"

My way or the Highway
Permanently from our blood driven.
The direction of language drove me home.

IV.
A little city was burning
level with my eyes:    those villages in radio tubes I pointed out to my sister as a child:

Red ikons
orange sodium. Burning a brace of candles. In Cajunland or on Yankee Soil & under its spells.

Prospero & mineral.
Back to my desk         the Nazarene.

Jeanne the Jesuit. . .letters.
What weight given learning.               Weight given suffering.

Lit alabaster
I live
photographing white-bulb lamps
against
birchtrees.

"The color calibration
Tends to go
You lose a bit of resolution" she says, "with this lens."

Struck by a fatal blaze. Innocenzia!
Pale lemon yellow (the "almost" colour of a big Italianate stuccoed house just east of St Charles)
"Lemon and indigo

"The light lime green of maples rushing toward full leaves.
The turquoise on the inside of segments of abandoned chitin shells.

The Popsicle orange of the furry backside of a subspecies of bumblebee."
A friend answers me when I ask, "What are your favorite colors?"

*

V.
When a woman tells a man how she feels about a marriage
Usually he is sad and surprised.
So late so much comes to light.

Having a man is sharing one.

Walking in sun weak as watered wine                       she does not complain.

Trying trying             to reach my sister:
Instead of a dark curtain       a scrim.
Nazareth. The Nazarene.        North of Caroline.
           Our building has a silver rim
           Silver as the tooling on the Torah
           Grandmother brought back from Tel Aviv
           to her thirsting granddaughters            clear glasses of water:
                       Flashflood of psalms.

//   Advance   //