Lynn Strongin: Two Poems

A low slow thing moves against darkness, on wheels |
Tintoretto Twilight

A low slow thing moves against darkness, on wheels

is that me?     Shadowing an amputee on a cart in a miracle play?
But I am certain I was a joyful boy
in Vermeer's Delft, his "little Street" an altar for that Jewish child, me.

Coin spilled all over February floor:
I stare at golds & silver today
imagining each the small star of a friend's planetary cancer.

By now, the whole sky is lit up with her:
when memory develops holes
like bits of negatives dissolving
          I see thru those brown-black gaps
          like eye framing pitiless sky.

Tintoretto Twilight

falls     like drapery      over the copper colored people
making their slow way home from work     Tuesday bearing the burden on curved shoulders again.

Shoeblack in the hair
takes
the hair out

So does radiation. Will she ever have what she covets? A medieval fringe again,
     our Anne? Only in heaven.
I strike a match
upon memory but it fails to ignite

Is this match wet? Or virgin?     twice, harder,
a third time
the holy trinity: I drop it to watch flame in glass burn a second, then blow it
     out.

Cup my head in my hands:
this darkly knotted world
this conundrum.

Poet's Biography:

Lynn Strongin is an American poet living in Canada. Born (NYC) 1939, she knew from an early age that she would be a creator, first of music, then later of poetry. Worked for Denise Levertov in the politically active Sixties in Berkeley. She is the author of ten books, including one anthology and one electronic chapbook. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies, fifty-five journals both in print and on-line. Recently work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has recent work published or forthcoming in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, New Works Review, Tryst, The Pedestal Magazine, Moria, Blue Fifth Review, and elsewhere.