Lynn Strongin She has the stepchild of cancers      circling her with its long white arms: this is chance, this misfortune. Not tatty, tall, raised in Europe, one shoulder hiked, will she slip over the horizon     like a negative off a table in the darkroom? A cipher off the screen? Or will she be alive a year from now, carrying her portable oxygen like a fragile violet in a glass? My perpetual dream of snow   blindout blizzards      whiting lamp posts & landscapes. plus the lambs     frost coating eyelashes.      They cannot save her    she's only forty-one.      Childhood bleakness   assaults me:      So many years spent trying to get away      crawling up to the charred black-red brick wall      at night touching push-dials    the past's buttons      red-alert over      white-oak whorled    barbed wire birds      plunged into greiving      snow hoods the panic-button    while all the while we ought to have been      chancing things:      cherishing the ability to pull back from the world.

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