Big Rain

Where I grew up leaves turned red in autumn, New England
Maritimes rooves white in December. There were four seasons
Cut as out of colored construction paper.

Let them change not
A word
Of my soul

The pulley
The box
The wheels.

The loon
Beaver
Lobster fisherman with wood crates and fairytale nets

Crenellated
Nightfalls
During World War II on Lake Champlain.

(read the fine-print:
it’s for my adopted country,
Canada where I first saw icicled children thru hospitals windows

And
Intuited
One day I must enter in.)
Spring?
Often in February, like today, we had big rain
Hail as big as doll plates.

Big Like the hydrocephalic child’s
The little girl was taken to in a strange part of town
The poor part of an Irish town

Where her
Mother’s help lived:
The little girl saw a baby with a grownup pillow, propped sitting in a
wooden box outside row housing in the sun.

Later, when she became a nurse
She saw
Her second hydrocephalic child. Just a baby but she remembered that sight
in Ireland the poor part of town.

Actually
It was a kind thing
The family did for him but it struck her as so strange.
When I made music with hospitalized children up north here in Canada:
My past finally caught up with me the little red wagon
I had night fears, night sweats, nightmares.

My children
Were drawn in a little red wagon
With a head as huge as a window & no limbs, or stump limbs

Beggaring no pity
But carrying on gaffing--grinning
Against a potato peeling sky

Big
As hail huge_____ as a Monster mother
Blinding you. Big as this story

Told me
Today by the Irish woman:
Big as your sorrow when your mother dies, your blackest hole, Hard.
Crystal. Bullet-like. Big rain.

***

Little Red Wagon & surgical pins

The little red wagon of my childhood
Is filled
With children clamoring in casts. Congenital hip disease

Frog-legged
Splayed
Laughing.

The song floats
As a cry
Both over

& under the sleeping:
both
pillow and coverlet

while the Fire Department with Inkspots tail wagging
orders a new firechief in the child’s dream
who sets things on fire.

No extinguishing,
My childhood
Extracted the last drop of loneliness from me, emptying like sand

The bag
Of
Pity.

I don’t want to either a Ltd edition
Nor out of print
Say the eyes of the child.

But read the fine print
Behind
My eyes: on scratched, starched vellum.

“Where ARE my?” asked the child
with
leukemia

when he woke up
and the pups
white as milk were blind at birth.

Magical Realism. Magical Realism.
But the Jerrys with their ugly brides had made it across
The Ocean to Long Island:


The boardwalk with babysitters & girls popping pink gum for us was a parade
of the hospital ward, the gym:
Was made
Of casted children in carts, wood wheelchair, & surgical pins

Blood sometimes
Soaked thru the
Cast leaving little maps alongside the initials

Blood
Darker than
The iron we were pumping. Black hoses held the heart’s liquid. Lynchpins

Held it
All
Together till, like a house of cards, it caved in.

Splat!
Went the blackberry bug
In the child’s hand.

It may be all
Make-Believe
Like the ballroom that glitters from our radios Saturday morning

Like the scream
Of the schizophrenic child
For whom no meds work who splits the world in two

Every few years
Like
A mirror. But she’s on another ward. Only, we hear her screams.

Bent Spine sage is coming.
Radio Flyer
Radiant, along a trapeze line, whizzes

Lightning vaults
Catch it with your hands. Lookout!

Purple hair
Street busker, Jester
Startles

Radons_____Radishes_____Redhead_____Carrot top
Radiotherapy
How much does it help brain cancer at the end?
Victim.
What victim? How ice skates with wooden splints. Hands are blue. Lips
purple.
Look Ma no hands!

It’s cold
But finches
Your small eggs won’t be shivering blue haloes.

What pull
What roped sun
What muscle

Fan.
Soldered
The cast-iron soldiers are now

The red Radio Flyer of my child
Turned into a wooden cart
Box a huge square in the sun

Look up thru the trees In Montreal
With more mood just keep putting one field before the other
Amazing Grace is round the bend.
I mastered loneliness in my childhood
See how crystal glitters
One ecstasy could be enough

Big hood
Bright eyes
Paralyzed limbs.
_____Look out the window
_____How it bounces like a tiny mercury ball pinged by the little finger
_____In grandpapa’s black game
_____Back in the rich Rosenblum estate
_____With the diamond window panes & Waterford Crystal.
_____So sproings
_____The temper of the night nurse, O head matron
_____We are noddy & big ears
_____We are the ultimate
_____Milky way
_____The Little red wood, torn wagon
_____You won’t survive the crash
_____When we run you over
_____You in Scotland, Ireland, Romanian
_____You’re worldwide
_____That frown_____ that borrowed

***

Lili Marlene
_____She shows her leg to the orderlies:
_____She smokes during breaking
_____We seen her stab them out
_____The way she stabs us with her tongue
_____Fumigates our toys each weekend
_____Before parents visits:
_____They come back
_____Bunies limp as boiled lemons.
_____That bustle
_____Like the rear end of a peahen
_____That iron will I’d know her anywhere
_____The only place she can run
_____Is another children’s prison.
_____What will she do when they’re all shut down
_____And we’re let free
_____Like raptors
_____To comb the skies
_____And claw her eyeballs out
_____Eh? What then.
_____So shoot spitballs at it
_____If we had a branch for a slingshot
_____We’d use that.
I’d muscle my tongue to busk her to kick her black & blue in the shins as I
did with mean kids back on the concrete playground, the war on
_____Or the dirt one.
_____What was that war to this war?
_____Her cruelty
_____Could scrub basins clean of the finish.
_____Madame Bedpan
_____With ice slap at four a.m.
_____Gets round
_____ Bends around the globe
_____Like the rings around Saturn.
_____Yes, ma’am, Sergeant.
You’ll be flattened as a pancake
_____Sreamrolled by a semi
_____With umpteen wheels
_____you feel nothing.

***

Lynn Strongin's The Girl With Copper-Colored Hair (Conflux Press) will be published by the end of this month, October. Rembrandt's Smock (Plain View Pres) is due out soon as well and my collection of short stories, a Jewish girl in the South Spin the Bottle, Kiss Me was just accepted for publication with Plain View Press.