Lifshin, Lyn US

 

 

Free Verse   from Race Track Poems   22 Jackson Ave   my father, newly gone as if he hadn’t always been, a ghost in the tumble weed. It was too soon to know poems could grow, not just a lip, or a finger. 19, I thought I as past whatever mattered. My father’s screeches I don’t want to be at the wedding or pay buried with him that other cold December, no amulet against any cold   45     22 Jackson Avenue   I still thought the tumbleweed would remember me, the willow arrange her skirt and only one blood maple. Each day, life was in the rear view mirror. My uncles with tennis clothes, my sister’s bangs. I was never wild. I only imagined that on paper, moved as if under water, untouched   46     222 Jackson Ave   white kitchen, cats dozing under the turquoise, lilac and blue candelabra. It was still. I dreamed a man in the trees, unsure I could deal with a body. Words were flesh, the only skin. Tumble weed drifted toward stairs that wouldn’t last even as long we did. Clay green eyes, color of a jar of dead leaves. Shadows seemed to move close, grow shoulders. I was alone too much. Animals no one else saw learned to stay away   47     222 Jackson Ave   white kitchen, cats dozing under the turquoise, lilac and blue candelabra. It was still. I dreamed a man in the trees, unsure I could deal with a body. Words were flesh, the only skin. Tumble weed drifted toward stairs that wouldn’t last even as long we did   48     222 Jackson Avenue   I was leaning in to what wasn’t. It could have been hours. I was too young to be a statue. By winter, the blood trees, the one color was gulped by grey. The buried kitten. Tumbleweed got restless, got wild I wanted to believe everything that was over wasn’t over   49     222 Jackson Avenue   I won’t count the years back, a breath it seems This morning, the same December stillness Ice cold blues. Even last night’s wind didn’t tear down the last nest I’m waiting for pansies under the little snow, the sky, with its new moon to bring more than hunger   50     222 Jackson Avenue   all night, star trails burned thru blinds. Goose music, some thing in branches The dark bowl of the pond freezes. If there was a moon on the vanity it would glow, yellow flame. Where there is heat, the cat follows. Where your words flamed, skin burns, my legs open, rose lotioned, waiting   51     It Had to be Native Dancer   I’m sure, my mother’s horse, the one she gleamed over while I was wondering about Milkmaid lipstick, wondering if my hips would ever be as thin as I liked. That pale horse. Somehow, my mother who never followed the track knew he was hers. She had him to herself, curled on the blue velvet couch while her daughters babbled about boys and clothes. He was her child. He was everything her husband was not, fast, gorgeous, wild, intense and if she couldn’t have the life she still dreamed of with the man she bought her last camisole for but could not have him, she’d lose herself, for the moment, in something better   52     222 Jackson Avenue   it was the night I threw a glass. There was blood on the floor. There was no strawberry moon, no one who wouldn’t abandon, only my mother, long distance on a phone line that went dead. I was standing in rubble, glass. Wedding gifts sliced, ankle deep, calf high. It was as if I had done it all, ruined her, ruined anything that mattered. Terror fell like glass feathers. It was close to the darkest, longest night   53     222 Jackson Avenue   abandoned, always when there wasn’t any light. Night spread its blackness like sheets in a house where no one lives I think of my mother on the phone then, how here, too, we’d talk and talk. When did I first feel so abandoned? Not by my father who never talked or the wild cold men I tried to tame. No, they were predictable as the ice on their fingers. So why now, when her leaving didn’t do it does every house feel full of ghosts?   54     222 Jackson Avenue   not the tumbleweed etching sand, not even the lover sleeping in orange poppies, wild as they were. Not the star trails, the black birds black berry tangle. Not a blue tawny as glass. Not what moved close to the ground learning how to stay far enough away but my mother’s voice in the next room the rose begonias with their wet brightness and her voice full of that color   55     222 Jackson Avenue   I think of thickening brambles, orange poppies where a west coast lover read Kathryn Mansfield, left the books among bottles of Chianti, rain soaked hard covers. I think of him watching stars as he couldn’t in jail, how that seemed romantic. How I left tins of good for him in coffee jars. Who was I then? Giving up what mattered? My body invulnerable as I was, sure it would stay for years, let alone my heart   56     222 Jackson Avenue   just before the place that sounded like metal apples. What would it matter, real ones would have rotted by now. Sand filled the stretch too deep as if an ocean was waiting. Tumble weed, poppies. Would I have noticed with out the ex con poet in the leaves I left tins of lasagna for. He was like the animals I feed, the geese with their music, doves two days from when the light stops shriveling and so slow I hardly notice the dark lets go just a little   57     222 Jackson Avenue   the hills long behind the stretch of sand, a beach I could imagine the sea washing against scratchy and dense, the poppies big as animals. I think of him with stolen beer and wine, books filched from the library. Years later it was Kathryn Mansfield’s hard cover books half buried under black berry vines. I had two lives and neither of them were working. The one that wouldn’t abandon me but of course he did and this façade, gorgeous and empty, the drug who made the world go away until he didn’t   58     Thinking of Pochantas   how she must have seen him as exotic, weird. Was she naked? Did he notice her breasts? Did they fall in love over English lessons? Did she betray her people? Long for a lover? Want something she could never have? Never imagine she’d be haunted by a myth life longer than hers?   59     Trying to Read What Seemed all that Matters   the first line is ok but then a word, “lookerh” could be “lock out” or “veranda” Neither makes sense. Or the broken cups. Oh, no, it was the day of the broken water heater, the Lockerbie day, my mother aging. Today, the anniversary. It was the day I met her at the bus, picked up paint for my old Mustang, left my phone number never imagining obscene phone calls bloomed from that. I drove thru snow, my mother feeling weak, feeling dizzy to my house where, no longer able to sit with me on the floor and fix the lazy susan, I was stunned by her frailness, how it glistened under thick wool, astonishing as sparkles on a black scarf she bought me another Christmas Eve at an outside snow studded market, still on the burled chest in the last house she breathed in 60 CALL ME HONEY ANY TIME YOU CAN’T SLEEP each night, 1:45, a siren on the clock. The goose music lulls. “Honey, if you can’t sleep, please call me.” Now it is TV, I keep the sound off all day but 1:45 and it’s a jolt, a jar. I’m thinking of her. Would I have called? This night, no interview, no class in the morning. The cat asleep on my lap. Not enough   61     222 Jackson Avenue   not even geese or flowers but my mother found tumble weed, new violets. So much sand but she always found coins, leaves that shouldn’t grow but of course did. When rain was over we went to the woods. If dreams were black, I didn’t notice. It was so long ago I’m twice the age I was. I buy pink lipstick to camouflage, few guess. As my mother always wanted to be thinner, called me skin and bones, now she finally is   62     222 Jackson Ave   sometimes when the white moon rises, the room is spooked by absence. One black filly, more real than anyone talking loudly and my mother, never here to hear goose music. They have gone with the deer, the last leaves. I think of my mother when she’d toss corn in pink light that made the floor rose, the new snow still pure, bloodless   63     222 Jackson Ave   there, at 1:45 I pull the quilt closer as if arms that could do what none left can. The cat stretches on my lap. I think of how she said “if you can’t sleep honey, call me, it will be like a pajama party.” I wonder who was lonelier   64     222 Jackson Ave   there, at 1:45 I pull the quilt closer as if arms that could do what none left can. The cat stretches on my lap. I think of how she said “if you can’t sleep honey, call me, it will be like a pajama party.” I wonder who was felt more alone   65     Read Additional Poems by XXX