Twin tan dogs, Obedience
Lynn Strongin

     

And Discipline
Trot at my heels along with Manners.

My red chimpanzee
Sasses me
From the banyan tree.

I polished like guns
My disciplines:
Music memorization

Which I must take to the hospital roof
Over the East River
Wheeled on a trolley.

These cameos come back
Oval
Ivories one-by-one.

I think of
Mother Courage
Smashing the glass which came with her meds

Till it shattered
Out of her life's frame.
Old soldiers do not die

They dissolve.
O brunette
You have stripped life like willow bark

The wand in your hand
While Doppler
Of fog horn pitching warning like small hooves dug in echoes despair so near the
verge of the ravine.

//   Advance   //