Lyn Lifshin, US

 

 

Free Verse Fourteen Selections from January Poems, 2006   Scars He Says, He Has New Ones   he says surgery was canceled days before. He says no implant no anything. I think of him jogging as magnolias spilled. He said the doctors said they can’t do anything. A lost year, spun around he says no Hong Kong, says disability, only a new cat, didn’t think he was ready, never is for love     Before The Scars   photographs of him launching a table dancing career before the scars, round faced forming a pre- punk band with his sister. I see him years later near his dying cat, the stray, one thing he loved     Didn't Think Was Ready, Never Am For Love   he writes. When he told me he rescued a diabetic stray, I didn’t believe him. If he could care, let something so deep into his life. “ A hunk,” friends said. Electricity on the brown velvet couch the night we didn’t. I’d taken my books from his rooms, a sign I’m sure he felt meant I wasn’t ready. He writes he is spun around, as I’d been. The magnolias, the marguerites. He’s adopted a new cat after the black beauty died, “didn’t think was ready, never am for love”     January 11 or Maybe 12   not the alabaster, not the what-had- stretched out, a beach with no footprints. Not the small words, scars, the high, the simultaneity. 6 inch heels in your skin, electric, eloquent when I don’t even spell check. Don’t tell me those who write what they know have no imagination: there’s too much, maybe worse to do with this mystery     Jan 11, Metro   no one doesn’t look colorless as the not-even-dove sky. Fog. Tips of ragged branches dissolve. I need the glitz of Keats’ words. I need the blue, his blue, a sky blue as eyes tucked under dead leaves, closer now than when we were close. Even then it was like talking to someone in a casket     January 11 1   if there was snow raccoons would be foraging thru snow banks, the stones by the pond buried, mounds big as cows. Rain jewels on the tree a nest hangs on tight in the black branch’s crotch would be invisible in its white footsteps, missteps, what nobody wanted under the white roof of sleep     January 11 2   each branch, wet jeweled, crystalline, pellucid. There will be no moon hurrying in blackness past the pond, the geese huddled in thickets, fog camouflaging what I would     January 11 3   each branch, wet jeweled, crystalline, pellucid. There will be no moon hurrying in blackness past the pond, the geese huddled in thickets, fog camouflaging what I wish I could     Haven't You Sometimes Just Walked The   fog that makes even the houses across the street invisible? You want the day to blur like slinking back under a quilt. Haven’t you wanted the world to go away? It’s not enough tangerine blossoms perfume the house. You want no outlines, nothing sure except how nothing is. Aren’t there days wild sun is just depressing? It’s what an ex-con said about life in Big Sur, a dark storm was luxury. In the fog, what’s stained or lined or old is muted like an out of focus print, like any pentimento it lets what was almost surface     Just Missing The Metro   record breaking January warm. It must be. I look at the emerald I must have grabbed to pull something green into me, think how my mother for years longed for one, her birthstone and when the uncles pooled up and got her one, it was, she found tho she wore it, pale off color, small. There was less green in her life. Not the emerald of any dreams. I look at mine in the warm sun, see a dark shape I’m not sure should be there, a cloud in the green tho I swear I won’t always, like her, find flaws in jewels     Glistening Trees   crystals commingle, “no such word” my Dr Marx said in Freshman Comp. “Be clear and direct.” Later I learned there was but still it’s horses, leaves branches, no scintillating, no phosphorescence lumbering thru What I see when I see the wild apricot on the verge of, smell of tangerine bloom, in the dark blue velvet     Thicker Than Fog 1   these blues camouflage and blur, last longer. Too warm for January. Wild apricot buds only to be slashed with ice. She says he treats her like a princess and I squirm. Unreal. She is those buds, opening too fast, mis- taking this fake warmth for what will leave her     Thicker Than Fog 2   these blues camouflage and blur, last longer. Too warm for January. Wild apricot buds only to be slashed with ice. She says he treats her like a princess and I squirm. Unreal. She is those buds, opening too fast, mis- taking this fake warmth for what will leave her ruined     My Mother and Native Dancer   She on the blue couch even then the velvet was worn from rooting for the grey ghost. I was probably doing home work, bored, wondering if I’d ever be an actress, be famous. That grey wonder in the grey living room neither of us could have imagined would sire a horse that would give birth to a filly I would fall in love with which now makes me think again it never has been this long since I talked to my mother

 

Read Additional Poems by xxx   Lyn Lifshin, US—Free Verse: Twelve Selections from January Poems, 2006: Tangerine Blossoms; Strange Dream; January 9; January 9, 2006; January 9; Subway, January 9; If You Write About what You Know Someone Says; Why Not The Scent Of Tangerines; January 10, 2006; Trying To Just Smell The Tangerine Blossoms; Don't She Says Have A Baby On Your Own —