Subterranea
Ione Citrin
Loaned to Oblivion
(A Poem in Four Parts)
Lynn Strongin
I.
THE WEEK WE WAIT
“Loaned to oblivion”
We complete half a dozen projects begun back in autumn. Innocent autumn.
You finish the greenhouse, I do some patch-work in the darkroom.
You, sister, shrug off old time, drive to the furthermost end of the
Island, the tippy brunt of Long Island
swallowed by legal clients. Get a new cell phone #.
Bent on fixing things: Home handywoman: water-filter for kitchen
with bluish otherworldly gleam: Like the potting shed thru gauze
curtains.
Heater on. 15 degrees Fahrenheit by night
35 by dawn.
One has to have a February soul to love
going round the corner.
Our Boston sister performs on her Sixteenth century del Jesu violin.
It’s you & I who have been thru things.
I hang at the kid’s library, a Tudor dollhouse, stuffed animals live in a
wallpapered box-bin.
Nerves of steel.
Hours drinking rivers of silence. Drunk on being a hermit, I return home to
sleep but wake at 3 a.m. to the blade in the cutlery drawer speaking.
Sister of wax candle lit, glowing, melting.
Strike a nerve & cast a hood of darkness over us,
But Taper sun, you come igniting object-after-object:
Bicycle spokes pobby bush out my window, that round.
Salt shaker, Wet rained-upon newsstand, how radiant
Even e-mail at twilight has a sheen. I gloss facts.
Cascading style-sheets.
Work stored for safekeeping;
I bend to hallowed task once more, but this time
approach work with reverence: Pull out a little, oiled pine drawer:
too scant & scathing prayer.
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II.
“SACREDLY YOURS” (Emily Dickinson signed a letter thus)
Some John Skelton slips into my lines.
Become reverent to overcome scare of things.
When there’s nothing to sing about.
Bent nail in my slim thumb.
They thought her a speed freak ’cuz she was rail-thin.
But Look She gazed with dispassionate eye
upon her own fate:
who gazed back at her, with respect, admiration, looking at what she Fate
was about to take & rape sister, skilled equestrian, lean horsewoman.
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III.
I BEGIN BEST IN DARKNESS Test,
harness of night slipped.
Over the hump of dawn.
Over the top of noon
into the purple hillock of evening.
Every history a fly in amber burns.
Story torched in steel-plate
Going round the corner for evening paper under my breath humming,
news of disasters still wet, shining
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IV.
Reflecting
cool silver ribbons of us fleeing fire, calumny, storm.
You go
black
nighttime.
Like slices taken by a scan,
triage-worker,
you find the unexpected, the hidden.
The operating theater may seem to carry it away
The operating theater may seem to carry it away
neither blessed nor virgin:
Carved stigmata, But there is a greater weight: Fate’s Medusa
inscrutable sign.