Chylde Morphia
Lynn Strongin

     

1. Christ Church, Elbow Park

Lapis cracks but slowly as pearls are ground to dust (Hilda Raz/ "Fire Should Be Measured by 
What Didn't Burn "National Public News"

The radius of this recent pain has a buzz:

pales & thorns               nails & spikes

the little bird, the rail rallies against darkness               day no longer hikes her skirts up crossing a 
stream, but puts on wool stockings, dreams.

Sorrow's sorrel-pony is in harness.

He shades the bells                               we bless nightfall.

We caress

Oil of sneakers stains the cement garage floor.

Wings clipped, touch & go

You bite the haloes of your nails:

Will we be buried in linseed-oiled pear wood

after years in black cafes?

Will we be wrapped in tallowed linen?

Who will tie, by Christ Church, Elbow Park, a bandage

give umbrage At death will we be

Divided a cleavage

of luck & loss

light & dark

horse-drawn, silver harnessed umbrage?

2. The part of our married bliss that peels away from our  other life is saddening

deer park locked with snow: Pearling

an ice floe                                ( we remember the old days); the ice

casts a light back at the sky

triggering a hollow feeling in the lungs like wings struggling to open

Life is a numinous labor of transformation

gradually assuming imperability of marble

dresser top:

cold of the brass pull.

slowly opening                              a Pandora's box:

Like children we extended our arms (a cape flies open, a carapace)

we want to be elevated

in all our stream-lined sea-eyed beauty

although we are sixty and seventy.

I set my age outside                                on a tree

to glint mysteriously                                treacherously:

the mystery draws me the silver mirror scares me

These things for which we give the other no signal, the heart whose fingers were rapped, kept in 
line at school

multi-faceted, a snow box, are scarred, scored & somewhat cruel.

3. Why you have always loved neon

Hello again, dark dog, Melancholy, off your anti-depressives, tongue lolling, body

the color of musk rose

mother of the ghost who barked at heels

the ghost the tint of an old dusty wedding gown.

In between times the funeral arranges itself like a ballerina

the weather will be rain

the color of the sky violet

the sounds a drone: intersections of Calvary & Maine lit up tubing:

between baths (as many a day as after polio)

an ice pack makes me dream of Labrador

polar bears. I could have, should have cottaged you

I lift myself from the brown couch, a chest nut in bloom

knowing why you have always been attracted to neon

hug me in black cashmere sweater turtleneck thick ribboned

hug me in a ribbing of forgiveness

for inscrutable pain.

4. You have been translating 18th century papal briefs

sent around Europe in post French-revolutionary Europe as anti-Illuminists

I am you and you are me

I am the door

rushed to a field hospital. Don't want so much attention, it's brutal.

Sure, I say, though I'm not so sure. Thanks in advance.

Nurse Kay is known on the children's ward as Nurse Okay

Four foot ten inches tall.

Tannery Primary school U.K. nurse's training:

she wears the flag of Britain on her breast pocket. Her breast underneath must be hardly a swelling on the chest                             taking me back to that last tie &

The British brass bands created to keep industrial workers healthy.

Sweeps of gold trumpets rang & swung like churchbell ropes

outside brick factories in evening.            Each nightfall when I'm not lucky ward light returns to 
me, a bogey-woman with torch.

The bed linens are scorched  my name is besmirched
if (unlike a Catholic or southern girl) I touch myself. Not ruled that legs stay together like best 
friends.

What could warn me of the agon, the boy never upset the steamer, he

was innocent:

treachery on the other side of the mirror where things are slidey, slippery a skinny dinner for the soul wailing at the broken man:

hungry, tired, thirsty.

5. Multiple Languages came at me like pigeons from the cote, terror with a blood-red throat: pulsing rubely

Last night barely got home when like melons big heads  bobbed hydrocephalic children's ghosts talking

all in languages I could not understand

Blinded as a mirror blind sights one when slanted in all directions by a restless hand.

Last winter

You wore the final tie I ever saw on a woman.

I do not want to go back to that day                              ever

A sever-

ance with the past I desire

when I was a roughneck riding branches like ponies,

Viewing ancestors down distant hallways

multi-layered smoke-colored, coke-colored glass

Could oval become more oval?

Could owl become more owl?

Could language which unveils

tighten the throat as a hood would the head

if hood were cauled child, cowl?

 

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