a much more rare obsession than mine, tho
in some ways, not that different. The woman
in love with what’s dead, what’s given up
on breathing, caring, could be me knocking
my knuckles raw on your metal door while
you gulp another beer, put your head down
on the table. With you, it often was like
singing to someone in a casket the lid was
already down on, still expecting something.
She buried animals in the woods, didn’t mind
touching them. Though I made our nights into
something more, I could have been coiled
close to a corpse. No, that part is a lie. Your
body was still warm. It was everything inside
where your heart must have been that was
rigid, ice. The woman in the film went to work,
an embalming assistant. Isn’t that what I’m
doing? Keeping you with words? Embracing
you on the sheet of this paper, a tentative
kiss on cold lips, the cuddling of cadavers?
In the film, the woman says loving the dead is
“like looking into the sun without going blind,
is like diving into a lake, sudden cold, then
silence.” She says it was addictive. I know about
the cold and quiet afterward, how you were a
drug. If she was spellbound by the dead, who
would say I wasn’t, trying to revive, resuscitate
someone not alive who couldn’t feel or care
with only the shell of the body. Here, where no
body can see, I could be licking your dead body
driving thru a car wash. I could be whispering
to the man across the aisle, “bodies are addictive.”
Our word for the loved and the dead are the same,
the beloved, and once you’ve had either while you
have them, you don’t need any other living people
in your life
done all over her body,
these notebooks could
be your skin. Now that
you’re dead, I can make
up what you want, and
when you want it. Each
verb’s a finger, a tongue,
the pen, a greeting, a kiss
hello or goodby. See how
I’ve used so many colors,
brushed the face I remember
with blues and onyx. I
imagine you under the
roses dreaming of
calligraphy, of the way I
move over you as if you
are what I write
far enough down
so the wind couldn’t
touch you even if
you were alive. You
don’t have to have
your car inspected,
pay taxes, think of
getting or leaving a
job. You don’t need
toothpaste, won’t
need blue shirts
to make your blue
eyes bluer, don’t need
cigarettes, a phone
mate or any mate.
You won’t see the
finger nail moon,
white boughs of lilac.
No more radio for
you, no Tasty Kakes
Flirt calling in to
your talk show, no
Naughty Lady to
whisper she hears
frogs, feels horny.
You won’t have
laundry to do won’t
feel lonely on week
ends but not lonely
enough to do some
thing to change it
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.