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. |