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.

Lynn Strongin’s “Audubon Wallpaper” is a part of her memoir Indigo. In 2006, the University of Iowa Press will publish her anthology The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy . She also has two chapbooks of poems coming out in 2006: Dovey & Me (Solo Press) and The Birds of the Past Are Singing (Cross-Cultural Communications, New York).

from Epileptic Projections