i.
Language the color of war &
It rains
Over & over
We are moving out of the earthquake window where all trembled:
As in
Water. No veto on life.
Then,
Under my boy-thin chest
Anjou-shaped pears were forming
When I see cottonwood tree seeds fly and drift in the summer air, I think about a similar thing. They will drift into different places. But once they germinate, they become cottonwood trees.
Walking against an Ireland-colored sky brick colored Anam Cara
When it all began
I found one who was there the iconic devastation which is the pity of war;
Not all the heather purples of the moor
Could make up for the thinness
From cancer
Not all the recitals of
Spring.
Due to her psychiatric illness she could never enjoy the translucence of April come.
These others
Because they had no sorrow
They had no joy.
ii.
My day began unhappily
Like during war:
This time I’d lost a small piece of paper
A library slip
Thinner than your petticoat or undershirt
Containing my notes for poems from the night before.
Found it.
A cousin recalling my sister’s glee
When I could “sit up in the pool
ii.
This island-cold
this crystal-living
and the invention of butterfly. Ars Poetica, poem within jewel-case poem.
The kitchen sink sucking water down.
the planetarium first painted in my skull
doomsday
Thru the twelve years of my life
Things hung on pegs:
Walking, first steps, last.
Scattered like dancing
Leaping bounding hiking mountains.
Love sputtering like a tallow candle.
Guzzling ice water
At the rusty pump I stood tiptoe:
The well.
Good god!
What did I dream
Under the full moon its ledgered schoolroom ruler:
The fuels
Of movement
Ecstatic again?
iii.
Moonlight clung to me like a gown I went dancing in
Thru the halls of the mental institution
Where daddy worked
An Ophelia.
Ritual. Exam. Mask.
The girl I love turning back covers searching for the library slip: Mine!
The dumbwaiter on one of our army posts
Which lifted up & down black-brown nothingness.
My sister & I thrilled
‘Ourselves
with the scare.
This island-cold
this crystal-living
and the invention of butterfly
—Lynn Strongin