Lyn Lifshin, US

 

 

Free Verse   Dark Corsage   faint smell of cologne. Later my sheets hold it, Another time, another place becomes a mantra. How does any one stay married he breathes in the rain into my hair. An accident, but I do this for a week. I buy clothes I wouldn’t have, surrounded by beauties. It isn’t easy. He pulls me closer, the perfect gigolo     When She Leaned into his Vest on the Plane   the smell not as foreign and no one in any aisle supposing they weren’t married. When she hears landing gear. When she hears “fasten,” no matter how smooth the landing, it won’t be. How they blocked off the real world four days, effervescent as sparkling burgundy. She knew all he wanted was her body, her stories. Branches in the rain, diamonds. His dark hair, her own. Wild deer and tossing their heads in the wind like licorice horses of a troika, like trees shadowing, blocking December light, stunning but leaving where they stand stained so nothing can grow     It was that Way in the Kitchen   it’s been that way in his arms. He couldn’t sleep he said and I felt sure when he asked How does anyone stay married? When he held my arm, said so many beautiful women, I could tell he’d been up all night. Glasses, no contacts. I wished him a happy birthday and he shook his head. If time really was relative or whatever my ex engineer husband said, not necessarily going forward, if we met in a different time. When I was a girl, I died for dark eyed men. His, mahogany, his hair more onyx than my mother’s onyx rings. When I buy too much velvet and silk, like someone grabbing a life jacket, saving them each Monday for tango or rumba, under what you see I’m like horses screaming, tossing their burning manes     It's not that we could have been mistaken for Lovers   not even in dreams I tried to choreograph. (In high school, for 11 nights I’d think of a boy then I’d dream about him. I remember the smell of your cologne. In his arms nothing else mattered, the 40 minutes of class. If there were other dancers in the room, they blurred. If these were the last hours, I would risk a kiss with my tongue. His fingers held me after the foxtrot flair. I am still that chubby girl waiting on the bleachers, waiting to be asked to dance. Even now, I need to know the steps, am terrified I can never follow right     Because it's Taboo, Forbidden   because at 20 I was never so wild for any man. Sure, that’s a lie but not for one whose arms circle me all these nights. The smell of your midnight shirt, somehow different. A good weekend with your wife tho you told me it was hard to stay married. Any night could be the last     If your Lips were to move   here and there, if I could get drunk with Vincent Millay, she’d understand. Doppelganger, insatiable, starved for the gorgeous velvet and men. The blue belles over her mother’s grave and yet, undone withouts, a solid oak of a man, undone too easily. Steel magnolia one almost lover called me. He could not hear what was about to rust     With him, or, the Riviting   It was what he always talked of: the connection. You’re not just moving thru the dance, each in your own world. He touches my shoulder. You are he says looking into my eyes and there is no other world. Only have eyes for. But even if he had no eyes, even if there was no light to see who was looking, he would make me feel; no one else in the world mattered to him, so intense, so dangerous     The Chameleon   when he comes to you who knows which role he is in. Give him a costume and he becomes it. He changes himself, he loves it. But when he dances with all the women it’s not like a guy in a candy store, seems he’s already been to the candy store. He has to get this woman in my hold he says, I have to see what it feels like to hold her. What is the connection. He’s looking for some thing between the two. He doesn’t move by him self. What woman doesn’t want this? What woman isn’t into danger       Miss the Metro on a Day I'm as Cold Inside as Outside   I think of those old women and men, terrified on the ice even before light dissolves in January gray. They look down, as if they expect nothing can hold them. As if they can’t hold up long. I think of the old woman with a greyhound pulled thru drifts. She was tall and sturdy, like her dog and then she wasn’t. Her dog could smell new life floating from under the snow but the woman, so statuesque you could still imagine her as a beauty, must have known too much about what was ahead as I felt last night, to want to frolic and dance with abandon- ment, to not always pause as she does, looking down, no it sure where she is     The Blues the Saddest Dark Songs that Stay the Longest   the blue waltz, blue blue windows behind the stars. You see a man on the metro, the ring on his left hand catches a glint of light and you make up a life time with him. It’s the same in the waltz, swept over the floor. It’s one body like when your skin is part of a horse, as if the same blood ran thru you, closer than to the one in your bed     Too much Ballroom   why, he asks that this is your favorite, not cha cha, not swing. The curve of his body, the only words     Rumba   its not in the shoulders, the arms. Sinuous, sensuous, it’s smoke. uncurl your left hip back. a writhe, a swivel of skin. I feel his body under clothes relax, while all I can think about is what I shouldn’t.     Rumba   its not in the shoulders, the arms. Sinuous, sensuous, it’s smoke. uncurl your left hip back. a writhe, a swivel of skin. I feel his body under clothes relax, while all I can think about is what I shouldn’t. Terrible to be his wife     Not the Music   but this sad blue waltz, a swirl of burnt iris, corsage of loss. The deepest petals still flaming. Not the step, Chasse and Lock, or Run Around or triple turns, not what’s at the edge of exploding in a gallop, a quick step but the north of you body turning the talking to the south of mine in language words aren’t enough for     This is only a Class   there are patterns like in math and technique. So what if bodies are close, it’s a recipe for waltz. It isn’t stew, it’s not hooking up, not barbequed spare ribs tho ribs should be close and the heat. But the recipe won’t deal with much of that. Instead, take the swirl of a good frame then add the woman’s tilt of her head, relax. Don’t let it matter if he’s ahead, or if she looks too long she won’t want to go away. Besides, this isn’t salsa or cha cha. So she looks. To stare at him would kill, would startle, distract so she couldn’t feel the words of his chest, his thighs between her legs which of course is where she wants it