Royal Boat Club
by Lynn Strongin
stands where the slaughter house used to, its wood scrubbed clean.
The pub's a mile down from Cattle Point where kine were ferried over
water:
these washed boards once blood-iron.
I run a coal train thru the mote in my eye:
Living with a nun
from time to time
I bless the soot, I kiss the ash. The flesh
asks to be touched and turned to music at last.
Lynn Strongin was born in New York City in 1939. Her early studies were in musical composition. She branched out into poetry after graduate school when she lived in Berkeley and worked for Denise Levertov. A long-standing desire to live in the desert led her to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she wrote her first book, The Dwarf Cycle, studied toward a doctorate, and won an NEA Creative Writing Grant. She has published seven books, among them Countrywoman/Surgeon, which was nominated for the Elliston Award. She has received two PEN grants and has published work in 50 journals (England, Italy, Canada, the United States) and 30 anthologies. Her anthology The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2006. She has made her home in British Columbia, Canada, where the infusion of British dialects enriches her later work.
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