RED PONY & RED PRIEST

         Illness has a ripple effect

by Lynn Strongin

 

“Do we see the future pass over the present’s dusky glass?”  Shelley

TO RIDE horses three-quarter time;
Red ponies flicker like candles across the plain,
The red priest, Vivaldi, comes out of the orphanage for girls, into morning air, score in hand, he is smiling.

How to tell
One cold day
From the next?

U-turns are difficult
in love. How reframe history…
The tangible, shoe-leather? In transit to Birkenau, Jews dying of thirst reached out, paid for half a cup.

Illness has a ripple effect: age twelve to eighty-one: how blunt the pain?
Hospital in childhood, now, Vivaldi, language slips, a rein in age. Pony, how         regain?
Listening to the Whiskey Bard smiling, full-throated while the moon is shining

I dreamt I was cradled in newspaper: behind the homily, home:
A flat-chested girl again (sitting at our stove turning the 4 dials: blue flame)
A private bitterness. My cheer had dodged a bullet. The disease a gut punch.

After they put childhood in the ground
This broken nest inside me singing in bed, wearing my Van Gogh        nightshirt curved spine. A sunflower stops me shy of
the knife.

My favorite dog buried in the yard.
Three friends sat down & wrote songs custom-fit.
I watched the red pony on the screen in hospital, I heard the Red Priest, Vivaldi:         separating cold day from cold day, the old & the
new me: melded what served me best, I’d learned to         knife-fight and not cry.