Children in Tree

by Lynn Strongin

HOW DID THOSE CHILDREN GET in that tree? Girl? Boy? One of them me.
Those branches do not ladder. Hands reaching, translucent skulls, veins showing. Above, beyond the cypress hanging in bayous.
On sky, they swirl like Pavel Tchelitchew’s, writhing in flame spewing cinders in the museum.

The guard’s breath quickens as I hold hands with my woman.
A keloid scar on her body
From running thru autumn leaves
life a wheel now, no ladder

Would it have been worse if her hair had caught fire?
Making her look like a figure in the tarot deck?
She, a girl, twelve, on the cusp
Balancing, a teeter-totter that made her question God
             out of the Ailanthus came petals, scarring her
             just where she had begun budding,
             I had just kissed a girl in the school hall in a way she never had.

* * *

I WAKE TO IT; Radar pings of sky object.
Woke to tragic events one cannot move on from.
Do I live in our own isolated religious community?

Words for fuel?
Are we meeting in a hayloft
Imagining it a fortress?

What will buttress us
When a secret from childhood gets out?
Filmic. Exsultate.
Is my space devoid of color? Grey-screen washing off a tint?
             Or does the agony of withholding
             Force it into color:
the bud thru cold soil,
the child into the ocean freezing beyond short history’s bearing?

* * *

THE WORLD around me takes shape, bits & bobs:
As ethereal fields, wheat, paler straw, heighten
Into a beyond-blond frame.

Transparency
Becomes key: pretty as an altar boy, you buy flowers, three kinds to bring home to me, bedbound.
Spring brings us the opacity of a weight between the ribs:

A loss we cannot set in our brown glazed vase in the hall.
No matter how tall
Water cannot fill it
             So, water loses height:
             becomes a nubbin, a button,
             extraordinary burden for so tiny a thing: mighty
             While this familiar world with the pain of walking
             after a life-altering accident:
             strikes again an inalterable, semi-transparent weight.

* * *

IN A WAVE of time,
A child with a bowl haircut
Not a strand of a braid

Much pain breaks my body,
Wrecks the spirit.
The spirit of spitfire in it.
Bathed in natural light I’d spin

This opaque land on which I stand
Would transform
like Water Street’s windowed buildings.
             A knob, walnut
To turn like a valve in A Body steeled to pain.

* * *

I START MY DAY with geometry.
Later
From my room you hear an old film can
converted into pill holder
pop open

Daffodils open
Unfastening color.
A replaced circuit breather illumines the john

A loo out of England,
Richard Stoltzman’s lullaby plays
A seed pod bursts open
             A photo fuzzy as a bubble
             As I come out of my caul, trouble.
             No waters; brave nigh / flight as you are
             Amelia Earhart flying over brute rubble.

* * *

A FIRE of flowers
Burns beside my bed
Into blue ether

This, to me, is ‘living’
hodie, this day.
I want to go to God.
Not bed.

Buy a cluster of three-color flowers.
Beggars
Lobe.
             If not love,
             What…at least hopes
             in the fringes of a Romanian shawl
             when I was a first-generation,
             silk-smooth kid.
             For honor, I bid.

* * *

AFTER POLIO
a she that looked like an old lady’s
Victorian boot
Laced. Glossy as glass.

Toward sunset one always feels loss.
Scotch lace took place in corners.
Lady bugs, coroners took mites away.

I folded like origami.
knotted.
The. Rope
             Of hope lifted me toward rafters.

* * *

ESTONIAN WINTER CLARITY
Glass quail
The music conservatory was a cloister.

I think of other extras;
The secret behind Japan’s wintry strawberries
The Grand Canyon of love.

The early berries depend upon kerosene-burning glasshouses.
A little carbon footprint
             Like the quail, chain-mailed
             In light of winter Tallinn-fraigile.
             if you take it in your hands it will be gone,
             the music from a cloister before the globe began.

Editor’s note: “Children in Tree” is an original poem first published in this issue of storySouth. Strongin shared that the poem is about inner and outer vision. Strongin also mentioned that what’s described in stanza two is a true incident from her life. As Strongin said, “A child I knew in modern dance class had scars on her calves from running thru autumn leaves she thought were no longer burning.” Finally, if you haven’t listened to “Lullaby” by the clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, do so now. It’s such a beautiful song.

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.