Before It's Light:
chapter: Other Landscapes

 

I Remember Haifa Being Lovely But

There were snakes in the
tent. My mother was
strong but she never
slept, was afraid of
dreaming. In Auschwitz
there was a numbness,
lull of just staying
alive. Her two babies
gassed before he, Dr.
Mengele. Do you know
who he is? She kept
her young sister alive
only to have her die
in her arms the night
of liberation. My mother
is big-boned but she
weighed under 80 lbs.
It was hot. I thought
the snakes lovely. No
drugs in Israel, no
food. I got pneumonia,
y mother knocked the
doctor to the floor
when they refused,
said I lost two in
the camp and if this
one dies I’ll kill
once you became a
mother, blue numbers
appeared mysteriously,
tattooed on your arm

 

Seeing The Documentary of
               The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen

The bodies like driftwood
tangling, naked. Pale
as marble or roots of trees suddenly torn
from the earth that
held it like the
scalped shrunken head
of the Polish scientist
who tried to run,
unreal as the man
shot when he chewed
earth to get out of
the cell for air, the
bottom half of his body
burning. Bodies stacked
like wood, a cross
dangling, child frozen
into a breast, his
legs cut off, wrinkled
little hot dogs

 

I Got The Bucks Figure A Long Slow

summer van ride up
through Canada, soak up
the cool green and then
I got to go, keep
on. I can’t just stay
in this room here. I’ll
never work for any
body. After ‘Nam,
I tried the dream,
the white picket
handcuffs, married
her out of pity,
ass-kissed the
school. No more --- you
think I’ve been offensive? You
ain’t seen --- watch out for my dog,
he’s mean and it’s not show.
I want to get them
for what they
turned me into. I got Librium,
vodka, a machete in the
top drawer. Machine gun
I polish, check each
night. Got medals in
a velvet zip bag
thrown into the corner.
In the photographs
near the mattress on
the floor, I’m 22,
trim, got a Vietnamese
girl with long hair
dripping spread eagle
on each knee. And these
were the dogs. They
couldn’t remove
the shrapnel, too close
to the spine. You see the
way my body’s shaking?
I’ll take some books
on ‘Nam, on the Holocaust.
Yeah get me a van, pack up
my mean old dog and
slide down the west
coast. Gotta figure
how to get guns
over the border. Did
you know I spoke Spanish
my first 4 years? Gonna
get me to El Salvador.
You know whose
side I’ll be
on

 

Like That

the men toppling over
shot in the back
it was as if their
heads were too heavy

the difference between who
got it and didn’t
as accidental as typing
treat instead
of threat

 

It’s Garnet or Blood,
               Depending on How You Look at It

The velvet’s unraveling a
little, the way petals
toward the end flop open
like an old sick woman’s

thighs, no longer worrying
about modesty. The treads
fray, a paler color on
their own like skin peeled
from a finger. The woman

who stitched these shoulders
in China in a basement with
no window or light felt
her life was that shriveling
skin. When her husband took

their daughter, she wanted
her heart to turn leathery,
wanted to be the red cut off
a fruit and throw into the

highway. It was a girl she
told herself, we couldn’t
keep her. At first she
bundled the velvet, rocked

it close to her like a child
at her breast. On the dampest
days, a stickiness near the
buttons, faint smell of milk

 

from the book Before It's Light
 
  
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."

A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead

     Almost every woman I know has had at least one heart-wrenching experience with a "bad news" boyfriend, and Lyn Lifshin is no exception. In this new collection of 103 poems she chronicles her own relationship with such a man, one who happened to be a popular radio personality, yet possessed a chilly heart. She tells her tale in a sequence of poems that reads like a novel, spanning the length of the relationship from beginning to end, including a period of time years later when she learns he has died of cancer....

Laura Stamps

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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