Archer

by Lynn Strongin

I keep seeing/landscapes
                            in the brain
(the gift’s been driven in
                            that keen.)

I keep fearing/stars
                            inside the skull
(the wound’s
                            that beautiful.)

I waken to the heartbeat
                            in the vein
                                          that round
                                                      the mind
                                                                    is wound

and hear the rushing in of rain
into the soul’s receiving ground.

***

With fire are the strict stars slain.

***

I tell you as the arrow’s clean;
I tell you as the heart is plain,
so will the soul endure/hold green
             the shafts of song—
             the dark Orphic shine.

The shots are called,
I call the shots my own.

Editor’s note: “Archer” was originally published in 31 New American Poets edited by Ron Schreiber (Hill and Wang, 1969).

Born in New York City at the end of the thirties, LYNN STRONGIN grew up as a musical child with a psychologist father and freelance artist mother. Following her parents’ divorce in the mid nineteen-forties when this was still not widespread, the second trauma of her childhood was contracting polio at age twelve. However, this allowed her to develop a gift for introspection. After studying musical composition, she went on to take a graduate degree in American literature and poetry at Stanford University. She is now totally devoting her life to poetry. She has written extensively about polio, the war years, and post-war life in her autobiography; INDIGO: An American Jewish Childhood. Her book SPECTRAL FREEDOM was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. She has made British Columbia, Canada, her home for the past thirty years, but still considers herself an American voice. Other subjects important to her are the American South, women’s freedom, and the injustices done to girls and women in such institutions as the Magdalene Laundries. She was recently nominated for the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in British Columbia.