Dark Salt: A Brush with Genius

By Jonathan Miller

In this collection of late works by Lynn Strongin, we find that perfect balance of salt and water spiced with symbolism and metaphor that poet Strongin does so well. Jewish Temple offerings included salt and Jewish people still dip their bread in salt on the Sabbath as a remembrance of those sacrifices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Casa de Snapdragon
• Release date: Jul 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781937240295

Jonathan Miller

Jonathan Miller writes for the Spectator and Sunday Times. His Languedoc village of 2,500 inhabitants overwhelmingly elected him to their local council in order to introduce some Anglo-Saxon common sense - or so he thought...

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Contents

Dark Salt

Dark Salt

A low slow thing moves against darkness, on wheels

Daylight Savings

How many people from Uruguay know Vietnamese

I do not know when I lost my way

What if there was a fire in the green room

After the Konzert

I found you smoking

Wind blows rain thru the window

I copied scores of the baroque master

You never want to have a baby.Didn’t we both say we were boys?

Before the big Mozart concert

I go back to the dressing room:

You blew away the clouds & dusted off the Sun

In the counting house of New Year,brass bars, gold coins

Beyond Salt

Prologue I

Prologue II

Beyond Salt,

No true adult remorse but I’m sorry I can say in my sleep

Beyond saltII

I cannot keep awake with more pails of coffee

Who are you to stand on a page-break (one falls off pedestals)

Every breath rubs salt in a wound

Like a nun on a wintry morning

II. Resolving

Resolving one issue of home life:

Without art, this would be a very lonely marriage.

We talked about dolls at the reading in a circle

Like stars falling down

Like Cold Mutton,

Gone Are Certain Antique Things

Gone Are Certain Antique Things

All that Sings will Squarely Die

The Dog CollarofaPriest

The world was wet boiled wool, was summer darkening

What do you want that you can’t have?

Blood tastes of metal & sugar

The question & the Dark News its Answer Carries

Blood tastes like metal, II

Who expected the water goose to walk across the night table

Watching Child’s train, cobalt like morphine

Gone are certain side steppers

Following the Chemical Footprints

Part II

Gone is even the longing for orgasm.

We were shaken out of our sockets by your death

Where does Miss Daisy want to be driven today?

Braille Garden

If we were to cross the street to read Braille,

Open addiction, let the blood pour

Old Salt

Last Dark Salt

In smoky, salty dark I start my last poems

Translator, the more space you put between you & daddy Death the better

A Heartstorm keeps her in, peppering soup

Dim Light in a Ground Glass Shade

Hawk

Marriage Lights Flickering,

The Ceiling Is

Know Your Bee

In the Heat I Switched Doctors

Closet Drinkers

Closet Drinker I

Closet Drinker, II

If we are woven together like roots of a baobab tree

I.Letter: Wim’s World Three Plates

II. The offspring less than the parent.

III. The Queen Celeste has her trunk cut off

IV. Echoing winter

Listening in winter, in age, to every change in color

I am like that extra scrap of paper balled up for the fire

I will show you one sharp dark reason

Women’s Lives are the Art of Folding

Atthe Edge of the Salt Marsh which is our lives

How can I close the complex ring around you

Annunciation

Part One

I wander the Land’s Watersheds

Annunciation, Starlight

Dare one long for that earthly thing, Bliss? Happiness?

I will not be a peskier but a presence:

Part Two

My more daily haunts are the glass of carbons going down. More

Imagine us spending one height in the U.K. during the war

Come, let us turn the page

How white the bitch’s teeth Christ said to the mob to notice

Stink or Brightness?

My friend, the one who loves books, who wanted a mother above all

What if mother had refused to abort her baby?

Part Three

What is the best diamond-mover in town? In Macon there’s one best known.

Adoration

Come on in here to watch the birth of baby birds of paradise

Barefoot, You’re Perfect

Part One

Lesbos, youhavewandered in the back door:flimflam, hooBarefoot, toes curled

I am running over ice fields at night

Likemilkexplosion

Rough Neck, Tumbleweed

Acts of Absolution

My toner is running low

Part Two

OOOO the burn the pain

Annunciation

Strung Out

Too awful for baring I hid my stash of readings

My family my beautiful Jewish family

Run back for that orthopedic shoe

Part Three

I asked my Love what steel cut oatmeal is

Time has stolen

Darkness is like glass

Blazer & Pager

Part Four

Brushed with genius

Struggling to keep eyes open under effect of morphine

Verdict

Ceiling Wax, the Saints

What rotten luck to begin the year with an argument with God

Nobody will miss feather dusting

Silk, brush, ptarmigan,

I had no hill to look upon

Brush with moonlight

Part Five

Kathryn, the mysterious object, swimming in its brandies

First time I carve your name in the bus steam

Canto of the baby onion

The Red Cross brought in props for sick children in the fifties

No this was not free falling

Back into the cotton box you go, robin

Robin-Hop

Never ask for flowers brought home in a glass tumbler

Don’t jaw too long, cotton box

No sooner had the torrential rains let in

In weather ugly as the war

About Lynn Strongin

Recent Releases by Casa de Snapdragon

Copyright

DARK SALT

A Brush with Genius, Late Poems

Lynn Strongin

Copyright © 2011, Lynn Strongin. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration Red Pepper Grinder copyright © Wim Blom. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or recording without the prior written permission of Lynn Strongin unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. Address inquiries to Permissions, JB Stillwater Publishing, 12901 Bryce Court NE, Albuquerque, NM 87112.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the printed edition

Strongin, Lynn.

Dark salt : a brush with genius, late poems / Lynn Strongin.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-9845681-4-7 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3569.T72D37 2011

811'.54--dc22

2011004719

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

20110217

JB Stillwater Publishing Company

12901 Bryce Avenue NE

Albuquerque, NM 87112

Jewish Temple offerings included salt; on the Sabbath, Jews still dip their bread in salt as a remembrance of those sacrifices. In the Old Testament, Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt. Author Sallie Tisdale notes that salt is as free as the water suspending it when it's dissolved, and as immutable as stone when it's dry - a fitting duality for Lot's wife, who overlooks Sodom to this day.

Dark Salt

Dark Salt

She stands there beside the blue salt shaker

Wooden from Lapland.

When she was still as a child

When she was a child still as water, light’s daughter

She foresaw

These writings blossoming, like the holy arcane, brilliant painfully handsome severe poems.

The Greek penned them

The Romans knew them. Dark & darker salt beside bright spice stand.

Blake's Jove

wielding his compass mane flowing, a lion.

There’s a new strange bird on the porch.

Dark salt stands around.

Magnetic healing words on the