Lyn Lifshin, US

 

 

Free Verse   Nineteen Selections from January Poems, 2006 On a Day of these Blues   forty octaves in B flat, a minor key day, a blue bice washed fog. It’s a blue galaxy on the metro, think of that when the cark cobalt stains your finger nails and the cat vomits her own blues     Madonna of the Blue Jean Skirt   a camouflage, as much as curls to hide what she doesn’t want any one to notice. She’s blue in blue, a disguise. Who knows it's one of 20 blue denim minis. Today it's her only one skin. It says sex, how could it not, 11 inches and her legs still good, a lure a tease tho if you take her up on it, think you can take it up or off, it would be so “Noli me tangere,” do not touch me     Blue, Past the Middle of the Month   Polar areas are turning into rain forests the wind’s died down, ice moves in word salads in the first 3 magazines I skim, the leaves wilting. On an old list: ”recovery clothes,” “I can’t, I can’t,” the old blues reforming What I wanted to gulp gulped me     Martin Luther King Day (1)   that year, the poet from the trees, still only on paper I’d picked up photographs to send him, my face round, candelabra It was before his huge face moved like a snake hardly over me Before I threaded too many necklaces of tears, the nightmare of having him, the nightmare of him go     Martin Luther King Day (2)   everything burning in me seemed a sin, hearing the news as if any normal life should be enough. All this now buried under layers of skin, I dreamt of wearing him like a glove as soon as my husband pulled out of the driveway. I knew his hands would be winged, I could feel guilt clot in my fingers     Martin Luther King Day (3)   before the news, I imagined myself splayed like fingers for the ex poet teasing from the other coast. He sent wine, he sent photographs and letters that made me know he’d be the first. Yes, I was married but that’s another poem. I’d just picked up photos to send him but suddenly it seemed hearing of death, a chalk eraser swiped clear any thought of skin on skin     Ginerra De Benci (1) Da Vinci painting   In her eyes, beyond her eyes, a look that only seems to let you in like the sheer cloth loosely buttoning, revealing nothing you might try to know. Resigned, or maybe patiently plotting, waiting, pale but under the mask a plan, revenge. Her skin, ivory, perfect, not even the cracked canvas making you suppose there are words, worlds you could decipher behind those eyes that say nothing     Ginerra De Benci (2) Da Vinci painting   tawny colors of the youngest fawn. As much a contrast as her hair, the tight curls frame her face. Promised to a man twice her age, something in her face has its own secrets, her own plans. More mysterious than Mona Lisa with her prepubescent skin that will shut out an old man’s touch, that other’s breath under the linden tree on her curls, all she has, all that keeps her from screaming     Dark Energy   you had it, were that mysterious force, made my universe expand. There was, looking back, no cosmological constant. Some times dark energy took over my own     "Vermillion" He Wrote or was it "Vertuil?"   town of poppies. I called a museum in Canada to ask what Monet called it. Poppies, color of lips. Vermillion lips. Never use that word an English professor said, too purple. Mercury he said too and something about mixing it with a vermilion powder to make blood. Red Mercury, that urban legend, that blood bomb, that what-isn’t except here     January Rain   too thick to see thru. If this was snow there wouldn’t be school for a week. Dark fog. The garage light will be on all day. Side ways and loud. My mail needs a rain coat. “On and off” the paper said. Now it’s in the sheets. If rain could help my insomnia, with this one I’d be Rip Van Winkle     On The Porch and the Scream   she said she got a call at a DC art gallery, she said a threat, a danger. Officials wanted keys to the pens where she kept orphaned and injured raccoons she was about to return to the wild. She pleaded for them to wait till she got home. Those animals are my reason to be she said later. She called local people to go to her house, tell her what they saw. One said there were dead raccoons on her porch. She drove wildly, saw men in breathing masks, animals screaming. Most of her five dozen raccoons dead. She had fed the youngest, gave them stuffed animals to snuggled with, cleaned the cages at least once a day. When tested, none of the raccoons had rabies     Never Use Vermilion in a Poem   maybe cinnabar/vermilion or mercury, that red pigment as much a mystery to me as Dr Marx, tall and dark, gave me a D for using “commingling—this is not a word,” he said “be clear and direct.” A red colored mercury, a mercury iodine that changes to yellow beta. Red mercury, as ex- plosive as the woman’s red shoes, cherry red silk and satin, so expensive, so unreasonably dangerous     Bad Friday Oh Not One More Awful Anything Blues   the chicken bone in my throat that won’t come up or go down. There, the last thing in the night, a barbed hook in the morning. When I try to talk it won’t let me. I can’t eat, it won’t let me swallow. If what I felt happening was an image it would be of a garden snake swallowing the Empire State Building     The Aloneliness Dream   so what if I’ve become some lost rose plastic caught in a cube, a petal you would have no idea is alive. What if you can’t get thru, the blue moths so thick, the blues a river bank of copperheads     Desperately Forgetting She's Dead   I dial my mother. She always got there on the first ring. This seems strange. Maybe she’s at the other end of the hall. The ring doesn’t stop until I realize she has, but not how there still is a phone there. Next I try my ex who I haven’t seen or even thought about for more years than it was when I met him. What would I do if he answered? There’d be nothing to say. “Is it snowy in Albany?” Have you and whoever had any more kids. And what of the man, lying by my side and the cat who’s used her litter box for a week, curling into my belly, warming me? Is it the blue moth blues, the only what— isn’t gnawing me?     Before Any Lavender Streaks, The Black Pond   maple tea, I’m still in flannel pajamas I haven’t worn since high school. School buses streaming by, the cat on the grate. Sometimes I think blackness remembers me, taking me back, soft as a down quilt. This darkness will rearrange her licorice raglan sleeves and promise a sleep I can drown in, half heavy goose music, the birds that do what they do in darkness so I can wake up to write a poem of light in this blackness     Trying To Not Write A Dark Poem   but to drift, water that takes the shape of what holds it. If I could sleep, drug- less as never be- fore, the stars white fire thru blinds, obsession gulped by the pond’s carp, at least thru night where branches, like antlers glow luminous against the Harvest moon     Sky Going Royal Blue   tangerine blossom scent heavy as June. Hardly a scrim of lemon. You think it will never touch you again, the ache in your fingers. The agony and ecstasy thrill. The cat sleeps on the grate. One nest has lasted months of cold as we haven’t. Little by little, the black rises. Birds come for crumbs as if their songs’ Morse codes can float in darkness, even in the grayest pewter light

 

Read Additional Poems by Lyn Lifshin   Lyn Lifshin: Free Verse:  Fifteen Selections from Cove Point: Camel, Dead Girls, Dying Girls (1), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (2), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (3), Dear Girls, Dying Girls (1), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (5), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (6), Dear Girls, Dying Girls (2), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (7), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (8), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (9), Dead Girls, Dying Girls (10), Dead Girl, Dying Girl (11), Dead Girl, Dying Girl (1), Dead Girls