on e mail like a gulp of rum with
honey, what my mother gave me
to keep the flu away, burning
as I swallowed. I think of the
summer it was sweltering,
jasmine and rose on my skin
so heavy somebody walked
off the train and I stopped to
wash it off at a café. I was
sweating in boots, cursed the
sun, the stain from rose oil on
my sleeve. I couldn’t believe
I’d agreed to traipse into town
with bags of poems to meet in a
stranger’s bedroom. With no
desk or table, we spread poems
over the bed, read for hours.
Then he stopped to bring me coke
and slid his body between the
family poems and my thighs with
the bed tilting. I slid closer to
him, felt the room become his
mouth, his body become a hard
muscle like the verbs in his
poems, his hand under my denim.
It was too late to stay, my face
rose as the scent he must have
smelled all over his body. I
had to go, was drenched and
not from the heat, throbbing, as
I am re-reading, “those quilts invite”
“I love the idea of you
putting quilts on your
plants, a yard of quilts
like a front yard bed
and you tucking in your
plants for naps.” The
just turned earth, your
just turned earth. You
won’t need a quilt,
you never liked any
thing too near the foot
that was mangled. The
other, buried in Nam.
I tucked the basil in,
covered cilantro and
chives, the wind a
lullaby getting some
thing ready for sleep or
dying, really the same
holding and wrapping
as the dark grows
imagining that he slips
from her the way rings
do from a finger in
the cold. Leaves. October,
black spots on the mirror.
Separation blues in the
bed. Touching his shoulders
here on paper, he’s like
all the flowers that I
draw, bright wild petals
that don’t connect to
any stem
Lyn Lifshin’s recent prizewinning book, Before It’s Light, was published winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997. Another Woman Who Looks Like Me will be published by Black Sparrow-David Godine in September 2004. Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of an award winning documentary film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass available from Women Make Movies. She is working on a collection of poems about the famous, short lived beautiful race horse, Ruffian. For more information, her web site is www.lynlifshin.com.