Legs Silver

by Lynn Strongin

like one of those Mercuries of the sixties
my hand
calm, blue veined,

jacket tweed
in the American grain.

God gives us hours beyond counting:
Darkening pendulum swings,
fulfillment always a stone’s throw beyond.

Sky that weedy tobacco
of clouds pulled apart:
an occasional slice of apple

             stored
like faith, buried: in a Sobranie, Black Russian.
Now canonized, comes Saint Evening.

Editor’s note: “Legs Silver” was originally selected by Jake Adam York for publication in the fall 2004 issue of storySouth. One of four poems by Strongin in that issue, these works showcased her return to poetry after moving away from the form during part of the 1980s and ’90s. As Strongin said in an interview with storySouth, this break in poetry was in part a result of her moving to Canada and living outside of her homeland. In the years following her 2004 publication in storySouth, a number of books and chapbooks of Strongin’s poetry would be released by various small presses.

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.