Lyn Lifshin, US

 

 

Free Verse   from Race Track Poems   My Mother's Coat   from the man who never didn’t see her as 24, vivacious long after the joie de vivre many wrote she filled college rooms with, was flattened, gulped. This floor length mink, once his dead wife’s, never worn. My mother who could have bought her own coat on phone calls she made obsessively to me, never would have paid for a mink. Even the ragged black cashmere, cuffs repaired, replaced, then worn again, triggered worry about moths, not pride or love of its beauty but she stored the mink, wore it in snow, a little bashful, a little proud, a pet she hadn’t wanted anyone to give her but since it was hers, she would store the coat each summer until one last heat when, like an abandoned, neglected pet it never got to the vault and July turned what was sleek and dark as my mother’s hair and eyes used to be, almost lifeless.     When I Heard Someone Complained "It Was Not Ethical, It Was For Cosmetic Reasons" the woman with the face transplant   When I hear stories made up of her suicide attempt, how it was not necessary, she wasn’t about to die, I think of her without a nose or mouth, with gums drying up, how she couldn’t eat. I think of someone unable to leave the house, not even at night. She was like the Hiroshima maidens, deformed. How they could have gone on, too hard to imagine. I think how at 38 her life was over, unable to talk or eat. You can’t kiss a face without lips. You can’t be kissed on the mouth if you don’t have one. When someone says “surgical risks” for a new face but not for a hole where there was one or says who needs a nose, a mouth, lips or a chin, I think of her coming to, saying “merci beau coups” as she started to stretch her new face, talk again, eat and drink without assistance. The muscles, the skin, cartilage, arteries, veins and nerves are starting to be part of her but her eyes are her own. I think of giving corneas, livers, hears and kidneys. I think how in addition to technical challenges the operations had been delayed by ethical considerations, that the delay is the only part that isn’t ethical     On The Morning After Missing The Red Shoes   tracks in first snow, something running for its life like a ballet dancer who can’t stop, whose shoes are her, or a horse running on bloody legs, wild for the finish line. Snow adorns seed pods, hangs from a sweet gum tree. Winter blues. Where you can’t see something in me is that dancer’s blood and something under bones, the horse no one could pull up where you can’t see, longing is overflowing what held it     December 7, 2005   first snow pulls back from what held it in the rip rap of dreams, dark barnacles, dead mothers, Dead lovers. if I could pull a new face over terror, over holes like that woman in France with a new face, wash away what the blues feeds on, his words on E mail. Still a black black type like for horse’s races: what matters most     The Flannel Nightgown   washed twice to lose the smell of my house. My mother got it for me like old towels that don’t snag or fade. It’s kept its softness. Royal with a matching long gown to go underneath. So many years sleeping in bikini underpants and t shirts under down quilts. the cat and another’s skin. But I put it on like some one with a face transplant, not wanting to disturb any thing, slide in and out of it like something growing, an animal slithering out of a layer of skin to become what when that layer held it it was on it’s way to becoming 14     December 7   the furnace leaps on, highs in the twenties under the ice fish glisten with silvery plants of life, the sky an ice grey, the water lilies under them, spring in their belly. Stairways of frozen grass. Blue shadows. Beavers’ prints in melting snow. Something in the pond, my own half drowned longing, blue gown of sleep that can’t sleep     December 7   crows in ebbing snow. The paper says pansies’ roots suck up water, white, plum and yellow. I watch for color thru snow, for something in your voice not buried so far it seems as colorless, dead     December 9   crystal maples, diamond on each branch. Geese break thru new snow, webbed bracelets jade pokes thru. Holiday season blues. Another southern man I couldn’t hold, or read     My Family, The Race Tracks   Willie Shoemaker at Atlantic City I just wanted to strut on the boards, slip thru crowds, new hips in a turquoise and sea mist dress, a sarong sailors’ eyes licked. I didn’t care if Eddie Arcaro was clutching a mane. I knew nothing. The pound of hooves not yet music