Dovey & Me
Lynn Strongin

1. Dovey

Rhymes with cove.

The love

began in this watry
birdy
world.

They said a harmonic conversion was going on.
Nobody in the family was well.
I, too, was hacking it as a human

polishing the lamp of memory nightly.
Then lightly
one night, I slipt out of my bones.

                  *  *  *

A blinding white seagull feather
had cut
my eyeball like glass early in the evening, over white wine:

I went down to the beach,
to discover this strange heap
asleep, breathing, yes, a she, & breathing

in a den as snug as a sweet potato hull:
living under a windblown log
muttering, “Welcome. Not many bear the ocean

Twelve months a year.
They love her in summer. Less in autumn. Fear her teeth
in winter. Wind in the rigging. They thought I’d gone clear out

of my skull
but I’d gone clear in.”

Dovey tells me, while the last ducks tell their young
bedtime stories—not nightmarish ones—
but duckling ones, whispered into my ear, as into eiderdown.


2. The Finding

I found her under the cliffs of Dover:
I loved her.

We weathered the worst winter
in one thousand years.

Exile had brought it on.
Then, the wind

deepened our hut
so we packed it with sandbags & red apples.

While snow blew in
whiter than sand

All winter,
we lay & read
by the kerosene lantern:
me, going, on good days, to the library
or for postage stamps
to the homeland.

Bright red apples.
Bright white moon.
She comforted me, like my child, in the fiery
wind, like a saw, blowing in.


3. Dovey & Me

See the sealight flooding in.
But this is Dovey’s day & mine

Defined
by crystals of salt & sand.
She old, half-human, half-legend.

I, halfway between old & young.
The light of earth is lit by snow
or rain across the waters, we alone in this hut with kerosene stove &

lantern.
She lived here fifty years before I found her.
I help gather twigs, fish skins.

She is always making a soup
that can nourish the bone
& marrow.

Sea-green eyes
& matted hair.

Her spine, a twisted S.
When she is bad, she stays in our hut all day reading.
Many books. Shakespeare. She cooks. I go out,

foraging for stones:
Britain
that noble island

on which the sun sets each evening:
Something or other is always catching my heart.
But Dovey? She has the moon, its features carved of hard stone

feldspar
pressed right into her chest
against her spine. She is mine. No she is not. Not mine. Not anyone’s.



Lynn Strongin is an American poet living in Canada. Her writing can be found in seven books, thirty anthologies, fifty journals ... She most recently edited The Sorrow Psalms, an anthology of twentieth-century elegies published by the University of Iowa Press. The poems that appear here are the first three in a longer cycle, also entitled Dovey & Me, to be published in full in just a week or two by Solo Press, in California.