Aren’t There Mornings
after what seems like
17 days of rain,
and the one you’re with
barking, a vicious dog
over nothing and you’re
caught off guard, spew as
many sewer words as
he’s slogged over you
but it’s still dinner
and you have to sit, stony
across the small table.
Don’t you want to just
pack a small suitcase,
get out, leave everything
behind? Of course
you can’t, there’s the
baby, the poems, the closet
of clothes you couldn’t
ever replace. How could
you leave, your mother
still young, is smiling at
the rail road station about to
start out for an adventure.
When I think of my
mother, smiling with a
friend on a bench outside the
Middlebury rail station,
her black curls, teeth still
white and know how different
the years ahead will be I
don’t even let myself
do more than barely notice
a man or two with dark
eyes on TV news, then go thru
the same routine where
I can try to hope the
night’s dream will not be
a nightmare
Do I Have To Really Write About What Seems Most Scary?
Isn’t it enough I’ve fought against
it, ballet classes every day,
often more than one. Do I have
to tell you I was stunned by the
letter from a woman who says “now
in the gym the men stop looking.”
Do I have to joke “pull the plug if
I can’t do ballet,” laugh when a
friend says “ I didn’t sleep with him
because I’d have to get undressed.”
Do I have to remember my mother
saying she’d rather be dead than
lose her teeth? Have to know if I
stay slim, size zero in ultra sexy
Victor’s Secret jeans without
more fat my face will look less
lovely. I think of that friend who
says she doesn’t worry about what
poem she’ll read but what she
will wear. Another says she wants
plastic surgery but doesn’t think
it’s right for someone in the arts,
shouldn’t she care about loftier things?
I think of another woman who will
only be photographed in certain
positions. Do I have to tell you what
I’m thinking about isn’t death?
Some Days
I can’t stand how ballet
is addictive as some
lovers. It’s the red
shoes in the blood,
you know that obsession.
How even pain won’t
let you walk away.
What’s rubbed raw as
where a lover’s pulled
from so fast there should
be skid marks, never
has a chance to become
tough or heal. You’re
worn out. It’s the same
thing over and over. I open
my legs like a wish bone,
bend backward more
than I can without
cracking. For a once
chubby pre teen, ballet is
a demon lover, taunting,
demanding, an agony it’s
impossible to resist.
Who can be cautious,
go easy I sigh, pulling on
tights the way I would
a man who I know
in the end will leave me
broken, but for a little
while makes me so high
More Red Shoes
Haven’t you wanted to
put them on and have
everything that holds
on to you dissolve in
the rearview mirror.
Don’t you want to be
flame? Be inflamed?
Haven’t you wanted to
dance with a newspaper
that morphs into a man?
Haven’t you wanted to
just get up from a pasta
dinner, walk backwards
to get a last look at the
room and plunge into
the weird reality of the
Red Shoes film? The
guavas and rouge tints
of Paris, Monte Carlo,
London mist and be
back in the forties when
everyone wore chic
clothes and were perfectly
mannered. But you knew
something smoldered
behind the veil of their
faces and you knew you
were stepping inside a
fairy tale where you won’t
even think of that small
dining room you left with
canned peaches and a
clean napkin. You are
moth, Lorelei at once,
hypnotized, hypnotizing.
The eyes glued to you
once those red shoes
you slide into, (easy
as adultery) glue them
selves to your blood,
become your blood as
you leap, smoke from
what is too hot to touch
Haven’t You Ever Wanted
The kind of lover you
will never get enough
of and if you did, you’d
have to die in his arms?
Haven’t you wanted,
especially on a day like
today with buds on the
edge of unfolding to
dance to death with a
passion you’d never
find in a normal lover’s
arms? Don’t you want
a dark fairy tale? Admit
it, not something out
of Desperate Housewives
but an all consuming
love with the power to
destroy those who love it
too much? I’m asking
you if you haven’t wanted
to care so wildly, letting
anything come in the
way would be heresy,
get out your red shoes. If
you can’t give me one good
reason not to give up
everything for passion,
let me try them on
Nightmare, March 17
Nothing, from the start
hasn’t been horrid. No
wonder after the explosions
of all day. But it gets
worse. Terrorists have taken
over the city, intent on
killing blacks and
Jews. In one part of town
they’re shooting. People
I know are gunned down. It’s
all a matter of chance.
I’m running in a street length
dress but it makes no
sense, I can’t win. I escape
this first slaughter,
find myself in the arms
of a dark man, a cross
between Colin Powell and
the man in a Woody Allen I
saw two nights before.
This isn’t fun.
Dead Girls, Dying Girls
I’ll let them go
if just 24 hours
go by and there
isn’t another
pale beauty ripped
from warm sheets
smelling of her
damp, if there
is not one more
amber alert, one
more abduction
before tomorrow
when it isn’t
supposed to rain as
it has for it seems
the whole spring
and maybe the cherries
will begin to pink
and pink wont
be only the color
of the dead girls
clothes, the animals
left among pink roses,
the pink rose of
her body slit
When I See She Is Reading Thursday
I think of the last
reading, halfway in
to chemo. I don’t
remember her hair
any different but how,
after a few hours
she nodded off. It
was the first time I
remember her with
out a cigarette. Her
husband joking, she
applauded the others,
read a short poem
herself. Half a year
between when he
helped her out of
the chair, when they
left early. And the
news: palliative
only, spread to the
pancreas, brain
stem. I sent yellow
tulips. “She will be
home in a few
days” on e mail from
her daughter. “She’s
had her favorite,
pepperoni.” I’m not
sure she knows what her
friends know. I think
how she would
intimidate me with
her strength, took over
the room, the work
shop, kept it in control
as I know she will
reading as if there was
nothing special, one
more in a string of what,
like all she’s taken
charge of she is
sure she still can
How Can You Expect Me Not To Write About Death?
Is there any other subject
splashed these last weeks
thickly across TV? Last
night I woke up wondering
how I could stand not
having my cat curl into my
skin, a fur doll, a breathing
pillow. How can I not think
of the bloated girl on the
feeding tube, legs splayed,
mouth connected to world
by a tube for medicine and
food. Why wouldn’t death
seep into every dream?
Who isn’t thinking of their
wills, the funerals they will
or won’t have? With the
Pope’s body lying in state
how can I not think of my
mother’s last hours, the
purple velvet they carried her
off in. It’s April 4, I want to
think of the wild plum my,
my favorite trees unfolding
slowly, late like a difficult
birth
The Geranium
I am going to stop thinking
of the I’m sure dead geranium.
I know it’s come back, like
a love you want to keep on
with since it seems there’s
been so much you’ve been thru
together. The wild red flame
flowers, even before any
buildings burned, before any
thing burned in me so wildly.
It’s only a plant, not some
one dying in a colorless
hospital room, their body
enough like a flower in water
that already smells. I kept
this flower going like an affair
I put too much in to leave.
And now I’m left with
what’s dead.
The Other Night I Had This Absurd Dream
terrorism was going on but it was
in only parts of the city. Some
were gunned down but others
seemed to make it to somewhere
else. I was in spike heels, a filmy
dress, chartreuse I think, the
color Nicole Kidman wore several
years ago to the Oscars. Suddenly
a dark man puts his arm around
me like a shawl and says its
the blacks and Jews they are after.
Ambulances across the pond and the
rain seemed like bullets. I wait for
guns from the street, something
terrifying as what catapulted Jessica
from her seat in the Campus Theater
when The Thing played. It comes
thru the blinds, pulls me from quilts
even the cat is hiding under. I can feel
what is just waiting for me slither
toward the bed, even the cat smells it,
leaps from her warm cove. It’s too
late to fall back to sleep. This terror will
wrap itself around me, weave itself in
to my hair so when I go to ballet it
it will keep me will keep me
leaping and turning. I will be as not
there as an old lover’s voice on his
answering machine I called months ago
to just listen to or feel safe I could
not still want him, safer than those
hours in the dark with the geese and
traffic not enough to make things
seem they were as they had been
If She Was White
if one hand
was on the small
of her back, the
other over her
mouth. If she was
swept a blurred
image in a photo
graph, a ghost.
Someone on a porch
might think she was
the wind, the cry
frozen, the only
color, her purple
dolphin, white on
white you wouldn’t
see light moving thru
black trees leaving
the dark even
darker
***
Lyn Lifshin
