In The Second Letter He Said

he lived near water in a house
with no sky, except for the light
my letters brought him. He wrote
of jails, the times he threw stones
all day and wouldn’t talk, said my
letters were the only thing that
touched him, my verbs on his skin.

It snowed all April. I stopped the
mail 11 days, then wrote back,
yes but what if there’s snow between
my legs. I didn’t think I cold hold
him, except on a page. He sounded
wild, a dream I could just touch
waking up the way I made his paper
face into skin, love like a city carved
of ice. You know about that one.

Chateau d’Yquem in the mail. That
noon I drank it in the sun on the rug,
dreamed incredible positions but not
that he’d really come, poems in his
broken shoes, lies taped around them.
I drank cognac, shaved my legs but
I couldn’t find a drawer where I could
hide him, kept him like special delivery
mail I’d take and read in the tub. He
was enormous. I had to fold him in half

to keep him under the driveway, the crush of
stones. The stones in him like the ones he
threw, piling on top of other stones as July
blurred in a cloud of fog and nutmeg. I
pretended to like the poems I knew were
stolen the way I pretended to fake more
with him. But he wouldn’t let me write,
wanted to revise my head, my days. I made
dentist appointments to be alone. Then he
started opening my mail, answering my letters.

He got busted in the A & P, laughed at the
magazine I read, said he read only Plath and
Dickey. I kept expecting to find him dead.
Blood on the branches, in the mailbox.
When he wasn’t there, by nine
the room started to blur, a clock
banged under my clothes
until he rattled the back door.

I wanted to think what we had was
all that mattered, like animals that
do things on the run. I was afraid, places
I touched on him seemed sharper.
I thought he was a tree the dead
branches could be cut from, wanted
to make soup out of stones. He got

jealous of whatever I wrote, even what
was full of him. I wasn’t a cook, the dust
from all the stones blew across the lawn.
Children followed his tracks, whispered
about the man who smelled of leaves.
Days were like paper erased so thin in
spots you could see thru it to where

dust gets more than snow
you couldn’t lie down in but
I can still see where we had



---

The Lightening Bug

I always imagine him slamming
his car into cliffs, plunging
down Big Sur. Still, it wasn’t
like him to make this last trick up
though he loved jokes. When we
were thru, he’d phone me in
strange mansions pretending to
be editors from around the

world. I never guessed right
away, hair across his Dutch
blue eyes, water that doesn’t stay.
The last story bizarre as the way
he got women and priests to
give him money, buy him

watches and typewriters, send
him some place to write.
His clothes were full of branches,
his hair smelled of smoke.
Broken bottles glittered like a
trail of crumbs deep in the leaves
when he went to get better and

didn’t. It got cold and dark, raw,
harder to steal silver dollars or
apples from the bent over trees.
At first he came under the
bathroom window at 9 with a match
like a firefly advertising availability
and I waited, my fingers on the switch.

Days we ran through tumbleweed,
but then his poems began to seem
like lies, even ones where he was on
a cliff listening for owls in coffee tins
he began to seem boring as the man
in the story where a woman leaves

her husband to find her lovers
as much as bore. I wanted the days
for myself, to be alone, not have
him slipping thru bleached grass
from the woods expecting me o
make eggs Benedict and to want
him. I couldn’t keep being a female

bug waiting for his flash. I was
tired of how he wanted to revise
my clothes, my life. I was sure he was
a bug that would shine after frost,
couldn’t be dying. Fireflies’ light
is not just for light of course but a
burning to mate. Before he began

opening my mail I’d had enough.
The woman who wrote me
from the west (whose ankles
he tied to a bed in Madrid
she seemed pleased to tell me)
said it happened Good Friday
but it still seems odd: he could

down cases of beer, gulp boxes of
nutmeg. I remember he could
drive when he couldn’t talk.
I don’t know if I believe he
set a bloody tablecloth for a
feast he knew he wouldn’t get
back to, then, like that tumbleweed
with nothing to connect to,
headed into the bus

---

Dissolves

We were like
drunks, dying
a little more
every time.
In bed we clutched
ashes. Now
when I
try, press
the space
between my
eyes to see
how it
was yes
your face comes
back but
so small
an apple-sized
sun its
light dissolves
on my skin.
When you lived here,
nothing else lasted long

---

The Spaces

must burn like hot
dirt in his
mouth
if he sees

so much of this, the
spaces. Years. She
twists, her
skin seems so heavy,
sometimes when she
walks out the
door, won’t come back

or flows out in a white
river
a stone nobody
can see

letting him slip from her
blood.
Does he feel it or

say the girl lives so deep
in her own water he
never knows

the house
holds together

the white leaves
settling in their bones

---

Enough

Listen, it’s been
enough, your
whiskey lips
don’t move my
snow like before,
whatever it was
it’s used up.
We just get low.
And those
lies, I don’t want
you moving thru my
arms anymore,
everything you
fall against
breaks open

---

from my new book:
  
Before It's Light - Lyn Lifshin
$16.00 (1-57423-114-6/paper)
$27.50 (1-57423-115-4/cloth trade)
$35.00 (1-57423-116-2/signed cloth)
Black Sparrow Press

     Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses." She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as " a modern Emily Dickinson."