Shaker Box, Broom, Clock
“How did a sect so small make objects so sublime?”
(Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, February 2006) “Shining
Tree of Life”
Nob on clock
faces
the cult of Box & Broom
Docent
Trifles make perfections but perfections Is no small thing:
capsized with that step-daughter of cancers, the lung
which the doctors shrug at
with their “I tol you do attitude,”
you flee Hurricane Rita to arrive at a sister’s in Austin
one lung left
one child grown
one canister of portable oxygen.
the drumbeat repetition of the heart
objects that look like objects
the roll of ordinary mornings
The knock of eggs boiling in a pot
A last long echo of the childhood
makes you shudder:
abused, outcast, girl-child by the barn:
echoes
sketched by a Seer
whom you studied: Blake’s drawing:
the practicality of it all:
the improbability of your cruel
spill
you could share with no one:
cooper tacks prevent rust
an underlying hysteria, arch-outsider
untimate loner:
preventing your taking your life
but taking poetry by the throat rather
and stroking those mystical feathers into song.
Hollyhock
You tell me it takes you ten minutes to remember the word “Hollyhock.”
I see the brusied blue vein where the IV was in yesterday
dripping the chemicals
ten hours
against lungs filled with tumors which took me back to the planetarium.
Kate, all you wanted to return to, like Dickinson was your carved
paper box
for poems.
A Hinge of paper
a shelf of sand.
Can memory be so slack? Is “chemo-Brain” a reality
or only doctors vindictive slang?
Slang.
You spoke the purest tongue: Almost Elizabethan.
Lost horses dotting your horizon
like lost figures wandered out of the Globe figure
into the present age
taking by the throat
the grain
the groat
The insects are beginning to wake up
a bee-guard will be a necessity:
Spinster s Ink on the toaster. Mother’s headed for her final
sleep.
Consult the magnetic words on our toaster:
“gratitude
possible.”
“Outsider”
says the wall
echoes the tunnel.
We go to the village for bee-guard
shoehorn.
Dark circumstances driven out, then back home.
We are alone: two women.
Nights
we wake
barnstorming brainstorming.
We fishnet for gold grains: What a luminous memory:
swimming with your child
during a thunder & lightning storm in high desert.
And now we are old:
Mother is sinking, fearful as a hive filled with bees
And you and I feel
orphaned at the white pale:
like nobody’s child.
Note: "Hollyhock" and "Shaker Box, Boom, Clock"
originally appeared in The Blue Room, and "The Insects
Are Beginning To Wake Up" originally appeared in Snakeskin.
[END]
© 2006 Lynn Strongin - Contributor's
Bio
