An Abundance of Yellow Dresses

by Lynn Strongin

WHEN I THREW OPEN YOUR CLOSET I saw an abundance of yellow
Dresses. So buy no more.
Behind closed doors we sleep
So thin the wind roars
Night pours bees out of hives
I watch sunlight              catch it like catching the first train into the city
Pouring thru the minute antique glass found at United Thrift:
I down to a nubbin of knot color
Time to refresh ourselves by drinking from the old roots what still millpond water
Remains
What white water is churning
Up new
Dreams
Kicking them as we do leaves in autumn.


IT IS AUTUMN
I am still walking
Waking to the dream of writing about an imaginary being
Have I not been with loss long enough?
Too long?
Or is it just beginning
WHEN half gods go, the gods arrive.


I AM CALLING FOR THE BICYCLE THIEF all things are flattened:
Pancaked silver soup cans during the war effort:
Trees      roadways.
Cocoburo, glass with scissors
Antique watch one hundred years old.
But coming back I am older, the gold
Setting trees
Reminds me of the plethora of yellow
Too bright to hold
It might be fire in shape of shawl or hat:
I cannot unlock my past.

The prime days of summer are about travel & vacation:
My life touches the still point of this turning world:
The hard drive cased in transparent plastic to protect
All my ribboned & unribboned words.

If I can make peace with tie
By late noon thing uncrumple
Like owls coming out of hiding        to brave the earliest dark
In which perhaps I am dwelling:
Nothing precisely wrong
But Lord things could not be right
Except you guide me thru this song.


PREFER NOTHING TO THE LOVE OF CHRIST Saint Benedickt says
How to be monastic and keep your day job:
Mine writing              sheaves arranged like the burst, the flood of lemon colored garments, jonquil
Which hits the closet-opener in the face.
Yet one wants stability as numerals climb, the clock ticking in the breviary style of the bones.
I picture Goya’s mired men fighting with cudgels.
The weaponized word mires the mind.
With silent pastels we will be painted in the kingdom of the deaf.

Where does the Mississippi carve its mud-dark paths?
Our pasts converge:
Life in a southern shack of reused lumber and here.
Where have I changed my course? Point to polio but that’s too simple.
And complex
As wrought silver tooled by hand.
One hundred years ago            a woman sat in a parlor
Her clothes, preserved behind glass, like confederate soldiers’ shrink to doll size.
A doll one would lift tenderly in the hands
Examining eye-sockets
Mouth which chips, kapok stuffing
Clothespin limbs
Every day I think tenderly of you, touch gently since age can crumble to dust
Limbs
At touch.
You have told me little; but enough to make me aware as the ferret or red fox in snow:
You have told me little but I wake longing, so not enough. Never enough.