Free Verse

 

 

Lyn Lifshin, US   from Race Track Poems   December 12   the one last nest, the one there must be feathers in. Vanilla tea steams. Cat on the grate. Flannel pajamas In the distance, Texas with mesquite and cedar, agerita, words exotic to me as the one who wrote them     December 12, 2005   white moon from the kitchen table. Glitz thru bare branches, dark as antlers The empty nest, a bead of twigs. Somewhere west, a man closes his butcher shop for good years after his wife climbed into the attic. There were stories, the girl strangled with a baby inside her, just moved to Boston, one of, was it 12 other victims Police cars near the Methodist church. January snow soot stained. I too was starting a life I couldn’t live in     The Moon Still As the Light Gets Shorter   less than ten more days. Charcoal sky this morning, not even the geese. Pink streaks, then back to charcoal. Who would think, tightening a rope, of those cleaning the blood later. That was a story from someone no longer. Soon I’ll scoop up the cat, hot as a warm stone, the coves of the house like another’s body     December 12   If I hadn’t noticed the pink streaks, the pond a mirror of trees on their heads gone in a breath. Still the muted rose, dusky as a stranger’s lips, there and then not there. When I read your words, not a part of my body feels like my body     Learning Italian   too early to look back. Rose wind in Cambridge. If I was a beauty then, I didn’t know. I memorized Italian verbs, read Pirandello. I write this, the day going black. Then light seemed endless. Hippy clothes, rose spangles. Was I in love? What did it matter? Raspberry beer in Cardulla’s, the flirtatious scientist. My husband at workshops, I read, memorized, conjugated until my eyes blurred But at night the Russian scientists swilled vodka, I danced in guava and rose and a low black dress the sailor-metallurgist’s eyes dove in deep, stopped my breath     December 15   schools close fast In the Carolinas, glitter branches. Enraged, I left messages. The cat stressed, pooped blood near the shower. Dirty snow, top lights on the tree, dead as so much seems. Those years, looking back, they’re the brown rose leaves. Diamonds in the sky, in our voice when it should be cherry burning weather     December 15   it’s those late October nights more real than this Thursday’s colorless waiting. Hardly visible snow. Schools close. A grey I’d drift past to you on, roads that skirt oak patches, fall mesquite fields taller than a man who of course could be you, mysterious, strange. You’d be carrying a gun, a rifle, 94 Winchester and of course there’d be a dog scrambling thru cedar boughs. I would be wondering if the ice will come. Someone in your jacket that smells of pine could touch my elbow in a dream of tangerine and slate sky. That pale light, the only world     December 15   the snow, starting to stick, old nests brim. Gulls back off, the pond a black bowl. White covers barberry and wild rose tangles. Larger flakes. Shadows grow wings. Some thing in the under brush only the cat can see weaves a cove white settles over. On a day I don’t want to leave the house, stars on dead branches should be enough and the perfume of burning cherry     April 15, 2005   after the dazed weeks, after the cover of afternoon quilts, the rose sun long gone, less than a week for the light to start coming back. Half of me wants to be buried like any last feathers in an old abandoned nest. The other wants to dance in late night violet light. Flakes get bigger. Some days I think “why, why continue with this?” The words, onyx, the only glitter, the words’ flesh     Have You Ever Started, Annoyed Just Enough to Leave?   a message on a machine. You know no one’s there. It starts, who knows over what. Some dinner you didn’t make (as if that was part of the agenda) Or it was him bitching. Ok, maybe he just made a remark that he was sick of something, not even something I can remember and I bet you had a day when you suddenly felt like shit. I’m the one who has a gripe—I don’t need to explain myself. Esp with a badly gashed leg and it was of course his suitcase, 2 of 9 and who has every heard of that many in OUR closet anyway,) scraping as if a vegetable peeler went up my leg the size of a dollar spurting blood, making a ruby trail thru 3 rooms. Now after five days of spurting blood I find it’s much worse than I knew like a 3rd class burn and whose fault really was it? But any- way, with the ritual of gauze and frosting and gauze again in the only bathroom I can use and he is upset that his friends who are taking over the house and who are used to going to places where there are 2 showers for 25 people or pooping and peeing in the trees for weeks are coming. And I’m supposed to feel guilty I said this. By the 3rd phone call I’m enraged. I’m a doormat, a second class slave. I didn’t decide the rugs need to be cleaned, the walls painted. I work like a dog, it’s not my fault I was born when everyone expected to get married and didn’t go to law school but I work my butt off and the stamps are all gone and by this time I am past furious. He might as well have been the one to make priority mail 4:05 in January, absurd as this bathroom situation. Was I hired as a cook? Does everyone have 6 couples stay in a town house where all the bedrooms are studies? Couldn’t they go to a motel? And even the snow and ice coming— it must be his fault and I’m thinking of when he retires he’ll need a cook and a cleaning woman. Honestly, hasn’t this happened to you? One thing reminds you of other things that seem more and more unfair. I buy my own insurance, my clothes, my lipstick. I wanted some angel food cake last night but did he get any? But I remember he walked blocks to get his friend a fruit flavored yogurt swirl and still bet he’d do it. I’ve lost it. I wanted to just drink my tea and write for once with the snow coming, curl up with the cat but I can’t even remember what that first thing was that got to me. Do you know what I mean? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s done this? But today I looked out and he was late, only got to the first two calls when I got him still in a good mood, walking thru the arboretum’s brown velvet roses and seeing the city’s beauty against the new sun so I tell him delete, delete, delete the next 6,7 or 8 calls and we both feel better and with me calmer, I hope the cat does too     December 15   white sticks to the grass. I first wrote graves. Gulls make snow angels where for the first time an old lover is where I expect him to be. Mounds on mounds, iced bowls of pond. Schools not closed, close early. Star trails burn down. White camouflages. His last words, they can’t be true     December 15   before the other houses, deer. Lit apartments the fire flares from like run away dogs where a woman screams and a man catches a baby from a third floor     December Grey   slate grey sky. Grey like yesterday, grey like the day before. Pearl grey. Dove grey. Pitch black goes color- less, the color of ambiguity, grey as eyes. Battleships, pewter, slate and ash. Grey green of the ocean when snow lets up. Blue grey of a Jackson Pollock painting. Grey, the absence of color, a color of its own, pale monotony grey, a gravely day light, a little bleak, a little not bleak     More Grey   grey as the absence of color, a grey grey as death. Mann said “life may be sad and grey but color is false.” The grey months of Europe, the grey south of Europe. To embrace grey, resist the idea that grey is absence. What is silver but shiny grey?     Absolute Grey   a holy grail of grey, a gray beyond which nothing is grayer. Add on or take away one thing from absolute grey and it would be less perfect in its greyness. Think of a rainy day in Stockholm, then notice they paint the city lively colors, they resist absolute grey. They paint a line of yellows. Maybe it’s there at 3:30 in the afternoon on a cold over cast December day in a country that makes no defense against grey. Grey concrete sky, grey grass, so grey that if an ocean of white and an ocean of black mingled for millenniums, they still couldn’t be greyer