Lyn Lifshin

Just out from Lyn Lifshin: The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffin, Texas Review Press. Also just out: Another Woman Who Looks Like Me from Black Sparrow at Godine, selected as the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence for previous finalists of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has over 120 books & edited 4 anthologies. Her website: www.lynlifshin.com. Her last two Black Sparrow books, Cold Comfort and Before It's Light, won Paterson Review Awards. New also: In Mirrors, An Unfinished Store, The Daughter I Don't Have, She Was Found Treading Water, August Wind, and An Unfinished Journey. Comming soon: Tsunami Poems,  and All The Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living And Dead, All True, Especially The Lies, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness will be published by Texas Review Press in March 2008 and Desire will be published by World Parade Books in March 2008.
 

Eight Poems from Cove Point

When I Think of the Scar Where the other Car Scalped my Forehead

When I took off the steri strips
I couldn’t stand the scar, how in
a poster photograph from a
week before, my skin was taut.
I couldn’t stand the white
jagged line, as now each new
line is a jeer. I don’t want to see
what pulls away from what
held it, like in the house
I’m rarely in: a few weeks
away and the webs move in,
something I can’t see is
doing dirt. Trails of sawdust,
a hieroglyph that no matter
I’ve redone the bathrooms,
there is something buried,
waiting to start gnawing
thru grout, tile smooth
as my skin then. Wood cream
on the cherry sinks in, does as
little as face cream. What
I vacuum, suck up like
a belly once concave
moves in darkness, spiders,
worms under the floor
waiting for their turn

 

 

The Way You Know

 

suddenly something is very
changed. It’s like that
snow smell in the air.
You’ve noticed it,
haven’t you? And know
the way it sends you
tumbling to decades ago.
Smell is the one sense
that can’t be censored.
But sometimes just
a word in an e mail, the
slightest dry brush
of lips lays the whole
scenario out. One shrug
of the shoulders of the
man my mother loved,
one I may have a Yiddisher
name but that doesn’t
mean I’m not goyim
and my mother knew,
as I do, tho we go on
living quietly

 

 

Dark Horse

 

what was it about that
dark filly, how did
Ruffian, because if
you know anything
about me you know
I’ve been obsessed by
her in a way I don’t
understand. And if you
don’t know me, maybe
you can help me figure
out how this freak
horse took me hostage,
does. She was huge
when I needed some
thing bigger than any
thing around me. But
you know the story.
Someone I can’t track
down said you look
for what you don’t
have in the horse you
go for. What made her
perfect, killed her, her
wild speed. What did I
want from this beauty,
a tomboy, all business
some say, a real queen.
I’m still her captive.
But you, if you are
reading this and you
have some idea, some
clue, please help,
write me

 

 

Sometimes When I See People In The Park With Their Lunch Bags From The Church

 

even on a day, say today, hardly
in the 40’s, maybe 50, I wonder
if they were too hungry to wait
to get back to their rooms. Or
maybe they don’t have a room,
come back in the dark and use
these same benches to sleep on.
Maybe it’s the fresh air in their
musty clothes. They must be a
little smelly, don’t you think?
Without enough to buy food
who could afford dry cleaning
or soap? Or maybe they like
sitting under the bare branches
with their cronies, other men,
because its mostly men without
jobs or a car. Who knows what
they once wanted? To be in a
band or sail to Panama? And
who knows, this woman on a
bench of her own, at a distance.
Maybe she wanted to sing rock
‘n roll or jazz or be a nurse,
a nun. But something’s gone
wrong and she’s not looking like
she’s enjoying anything this
second day of spring. She does
not look like she’s on any good
kind of trip, not feeling the sun
thru her black pea coat as she
hurls an empty apple juice box
as far into the grass as she can
as if practicing some basketball
shot, scoring from her moat of
plastic forks and collapsed
cartons that maybe makes her
remember something she
used to

 

 

April, Paris

 

Nothing would be less shall we call it what it is, a cliché
than April in Paris. But this poem got started with some
thing I don’t think I could do but it reminded me of
Aprils and then three magazines came with Paris
on the cover. Sometimes I’m amazed at all the places
I’m not, lets say Paris since actually it’s only March
but in the magazines they are at outdoor cafes which
must be quite chilly now. And I forgot the cigarette
smoke, until I see many in the photographs are holding
what I’m sure isn’t a pen. I wondered how they can
always be eating, biting and licking something sweet
and still have the most gorgeous bodies. I wonder too
how my friend, once an actress, so maybe that’s a
clue, could dress up in scanty, naughty, as she puts it,
clothes for her husband while I am sitting here in
baggy jeans and torn sweatshirts. I’m wondering if it’s
because he’s lost his job and she is trying to cheer him up.
I began thinking of Paris when she described the umbrella
she decorated with drops of rain, how she just wore
a garter belt under it. I thought of tear shaped drops of
rain I made for the Junior Prom’s April in Paris,
long before I felt the wind thru my hair on Pont Neuf.
It’s there in the photograph which I hope is more
original than the idea of the photograph because
I plan to use it on my next book. I wish I could feel
what she must, dolled up, trying to soothe this
man and getting off on it. As for me, only
imagining you, the one with fingers on me,
holding me on the page of a book
could make me as excited

 

 

Circus

 

It was at dinner in the mansion. I
admitted I’d never gone. So today’s
photograph of elephants lumbering
thru D.C. slammed me back to that
summer. Dinners at the colony,
always a safari. Sometimes to Iran,
sometimes the ballet with bun heads
at the main table. Nobody talked
of their day’s work. We might
jet to Les Deux Magots or listen
to stories of long gone guests
sliding naked down banisters,
or of ghosts in the blue room who
etched initials from outside. Martinis.
Amber light thru Tiffany glass. Who
wouldn’t feel in a wonderland
where the circus was one of many
desserts. I thought I’d rather go to a
movie in town. Or watch the last
light in the music room but I
was whisked by two older men to
Barnum’s straw palace and tho
I didn’t realize it then, it was the idea
becoming real, as it is here, years
later tho I needed to be talked into
opening to what I never would
have on my own reminding me again
of how easy it is to not take in
what is right there for you to open

 

 

Rembember When You Wondered What "It" Would Be Like?


From the first pages in Love Without Fear
where it said if you let a man put his tongue
in your mouth you’ll let him do anything?
Remember when you thought you could
get pregnant dancing too close? How
fingers on the outside of a sheer shear
blouse was one thing but moving in past
the bra strap felt like a bug invading. We
were shocked to hear Jessica’s mother and
father took a bath together, naked. Somewhere
else Heathcliff adored without touching.
Remember when some mothers forbid Snows
of Kilamanjaro? Clitoris, a word I didn’t
know but when I felt mine it seemed broken,
peculiar. And did you look forward to
blood in your crotch? Remember getting
that first tampax in right, first diaphragm?
I was sure everyone could tell by the way I
was walking. And dear room mate, if
you are out there reading poetry which I
don’t suppose you do, remember how we
lay in the dark in the pea green room,
wondered what it would be like to have Dr
Fox with his red beard go down on us.
Was it this, was it love that would rescue
us and keep us safe from getting into
trouble, which of course it didn’t. Still,
somehow, older than parents with their
litany of “never let a boy,” rarely, but once
on a velvet brown couch in the west with
the heat from his thigh a forest fire,
all I could imagine, all I wanted was to
know what he would be like

 

 

Haven't You Ever Wanted To Use The Word Indigo?

 

the way it rolls off your tongue, blue,
mysterious. It’s rather old fashioned tho
but when you run out of words for the
blues, doesn’t indigo give it a little
class? Then, I think of Millay with her
indigo buntings, curled on the same
velvet couches I have tho they’ve been
re-covered, not indigo but a chocolate
brown. One visitor, visiting Steepletop
in Edna’s last years mentioned how
shabby the sofas were. I think of how
Vincent gave up her velvets, lovers, drugs
for the stillness. Except for the buntings.
But I digress. Indigo. I had to listen to
the Indigo Girls but I liked their name
better. I’d like to say I found the metaphor
to cinch this poem, to pull any reader
into Indigo ecstasy when I found some
E Mail about the film Indigo Children
but when I put the name into Google,
What I read lacked all iridescent blue,
the startling hypnotic glistening. Less
there than the marine’s startling icy eyes,
indigo jolting as sequins from deep under
ground as my real life pales

 

 

Montmartre

 

Haven’t you wanted, sometimes, to
walk into some painting, start a new
life? The quiet blues of Monet would
soothe but I don’t know how long I’d
want to stay there. Today I’m in the
mood for something more lively,
say Lautrec’s Demimonde. I want
that glitter, heavy sequin nights.
You take the yellow sunshine for
tonight. I want the club scene
that takes you out all night. Come
on, wouldn’t you, just for a night or
two? Gaslights and absinthe, even
the queasy night after dawn. Wouldn’t
you like to walk into Montmartre
where everything you did or
imagined doing was de rigueur,
pre-Aids with the drinkers and
artists and whores. Don’t be so P.C.,
so righteous you’d tell me you haven’t
imagined this? Give me the Circus
Fernando, streets where getting stoned
was easy and dancing girls kick high.
It’s just the other side of the canvas,
the thug life, a little lust. It was good
enough for Van Gogh and Lautrec,
Picasso. Can’t you hear Satie on the
piano? You won’t be able to miss
Toulouse, bulbous lips, drool. Could
you turn down a night where glee
and strangeness is wide open? Think
of Bob Dylan leaving Hibbing. A little
decadence can’t hurt. I want the swirl
of cloth under changing colored lights,
nothing square, nothing safe, want to
can can thru Paris, parting animal
nights, knees you can’t wait
to taste flashing

 

 

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