Lynn Strongin


Flip Flop My Mules

Those jewels

Go in the parking lot

I’m as happy as people on earth can be.

Pushed to the limit daily the grit of sun in trees

Flouring down

Late light

Finally

Ease.

These:

& my mules:

She who had been aghast

Watched a truck with “10800 Get Junk” pass

Thinking of the bricoleur

We all have been;

The past, mire & gold.

Good. Good. Belly good, as old Chinese say. Thirty three years.

Holy Moly says Orphan Annie

My love, I cannot read to the bottom of her thoughts

But God alone knows

She blossoms like the rose.

I go. Love flows.


Anne, your mind is a gold mine

With lace veins

Elves have not stolen.

Once you gouged your skull

Now no more

You strike Italian marble, with words delve deeper.

A marble & ebony magpie against sky

Doesn’t belong with Holly in our July

But scaling sky of a classicist O Salem

You have in your eye Sappho’s passion.


Now I know

At school, last days of 7th grade, I must have contracted polio.

Those last days I walked slow motion as thru oil

To the yellow brick library, a dollhouse in New Rochelle

Against a yellow brick sky

Toting books home, so thin, so lean.

Before we broke the dining room mirror the three of us, horrified

I found myself a mirror shattered.

Remember, darlin,

When you look askance at me

When you pop all my balloons & rain on my parade

(if you have wandered from me)

You were the angel

At the top of our Yuletide tree.


Grandmother’s cupboard

Was eerily magical

Hexagonal glass translucent

Wealth haunting as poverty

Toe crux of me.

Were her eyes green or gray?

Was she a flake with speckled eyes?

I always tried to live a good poem as a child before her

Wearing white stockings, combed blond bangs.

Finding thimbles of strangeness, steel shavings

Tarnished gold of old ring

O horn of hope. I found carbons

Copies of this fragile threatened globes.

Porcelain

Animals stood, statues:

A maverick, goat, sheep dog

Ghosting

While little sister with her chestnut bangs stood behind

“Horsy Dog!” she pointed to a Great Dane passing on Fifth Avenue

five stories below grandmother’s room

unfathered, unmothered—by my childhood polio nearly unsistered

but always in the presence of

Grandmother’s magus-like magical cupboard.


Midsummer Library

Libris, the Lion

Of wood is being refurbished:

Will his mane be golder in the fall, the snow?

“Branch into reading” a tree with a thousand flickering knives for leaves

shades a child’s imperiled head.

And I am one blue number:

Number

Than hollyhock

In this stream I have fed

Of discontent: stoicism must suffice, dry pie

This other side of paradise.