On the porcelain tub back I dream of lofting: Designing a space for a wooden ship By a still
sill-thread (like sill-light under a lintel)
You walk wooden parapets at night
Boxes of locked dolls.
Metal tins.
Sprockets & wheels, chains.
Child's gothic cathedral
Of stone-nests
Feeling slightly Quasi-Modoish: Gold Dreams.
Heaven must be stony
With burins
Marrow & cairns.
Bogs
A haymow
Once a year in autumn. Some rising, deep falling.
Lynn Strongin was born in NYC 1939, the last year of the Dirty Thirties, rto parents or European Jewish parents. Grew up in a rich cultural atmosphere. Polio at age 12 left her in a wheelchair, helped her develop her inner world. Fourteen published books as of this spring, she is a four time Pushcart Poetry Prize nominee, editor of THE SORROW PSALMS:A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (University of Iowa Press, 2006).