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Poetry
by Lyn
Lifshin
But
Instead Has Gone into Woods
A
girl goes into the woods
and for what reason
disappears
behind branches
and is never heard from again.
We don’t
really know why,
she could have gone shopping
or had lunch
with her mother
but instead has gone into
woods, alone,
without the lover,
and not for leaves or flowers.
It was a
clear bright day
very much like today.
It was today. Now
you might
imagine I’m that girl,
it seems there are
reasons. But
first consider: I don’t live
very near
those trees and my
head is already wild with branches
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I
Was Four, in Dotted
Swiss
summer pajamas,
my face a blotch of
measles in the
small
dark room over blue
grapes and rhubarb,
hot stucco
cracking.
17 North Seminary.
That July Friday
noon my
mother was
rushed in the grey
blimp of a Chevy
north to
where my
sister Joy would be
born two months
early. I
wasn’t
ready either and
missed my mother’s
cool
hands, her
bringing me frosty
glasses of pineapple
juice
and cherries
with a glass straw
as Nanny lost her
false
teeth, flushed
them down the toilet
then held me so tight
I
could smell lavender
and garlic in her
braided her, held
me
as so few ever
have since, as if
not to lose more
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Some
Afternoons When Nobody Was Fighting
my
mother took out
walnuts and chocolate
chips. My sister
and
I plunged our fingers
in flour and butter
smoother
than clay.
Pale dough oozing
between our fingers
while
the house filled
with blond bars rising.
Mother in her pink
dress
with black ballerinas
circling its bottom
turned
on the Victrola,
tucked her dress up into
pink nylon
bloomer pants,
kicked her legs up in the
air and my sister
and I
pranced thru the living
room, a bracelet around
her.
She was our Pied
Piper and we were
the children of
Hamlin,
circling her as close as the
dancers on her hem
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Nights
It Was Too Hot to Stay in the Apartment
We
drove to the lake, then stopped
at my grandmother’s. The
grown ups
sat in the screened porch on wicker
or the glider
whispering above the
clink of ice in wet glass. Spirea
and
yellow roses circled the earth under
stars. A silver
apple moon. Bor
wanted to sleep out on the lawn
and dragged
out our uncle’s army
blankets and chairs for a tent.
We
wanted the stars on our skin, the
small green apples to
hang over
the blanket to protect us from bats.
From the
straw mats, peonies glowed
like planets and if there was a
breeze,
it was roses and sweat. I wanted
our white cats
under the olive green
with us, their tongues snapping up
moths
and whatever buzzed thru the
clover. For an hour the
porch
seemed miles away until itchy with
bug bites
and feeling our shirts fill
with night air, my hair grow
curlier,
our mother came to fold up the blankets
and chairs
and I wished I was old
enough to stay alone until dawn
or
small enough to be scooped up, asleep
in arms that would
carry me up the
still hot apartment stairs and into
sheets
I wouldn’t know were still
warm until morning
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Sitting
in the Brown Chair
with Let's Pretend
on
the Radio
I
don’t think how the
m and m’s that soothe
only
made my fat legs
worse. I’m not thinking
how my
mother will
die, of fires that could
gulp a mother up,
leave
me like Bambi. I’m not
going over the baby
sitter’s
stories of what they did to
young girls in
tunnels, of
the ovens and gas or have
nightmares I’ll
wake up
screaming for one whole
year wanting someone to
lie
near me, hold me as if
from then on no one can get
close
enough. I don’t hear
my mother and father yelling,
my
mother howling that if
he loved us he’d want to buy
a
house, not stay in the apart-
ment he doesn’t even
pay
her father rent for but get
a place we wouldn’t
be
ashamed to bring friends.
What I can drift and dream
in
is more real. I don’t want
to leave the world of
golden
apples and silver geese. To
make sure, I close my
eyes,
make a wish on the first hay
load of summer then
wait
until it disappears
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Being
Jewish in a Small Town
someone
writes kike on
the blackboard and the
“k’s”
pull thru the
chalk, stick in my
plump
pale thighs.
Even after the high
school burns down
the
word is written in
the
ashes. My under
pants’ elastic snaps
on Main St
because
I can’t go to
Pilgrim
Fellowship.
I’m the one Jewish girl
in town but the
4
Cohen brothers
want
blond hair
blowing from their
car. They don’t know
my
black braids
smell
of almond.
I wear my clothes
loose so no one
dreams who
I am,
will
never know
Hebrew, keep a
Christmas tree in
my drawer.
In
the
dark, my fingers
could be the menorah
that pulls you
toward
honey in the snow
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Yellow
Roses
pinned
on stiff tulle,
glowed in the painted
high school
moonlight.
Mario’ Lanza’s Oh My
Love. When
Doug
dipped I smelled
Clearasil. Hours in
the tub
dreaming of
Dick Wood’s fingers
cutting in,
sweeping
me close. I wouldn’t
care if the stuck
pin
on the roses
went thru me,
the yellow musk
would be a
wreathe
on the grave of that
awful dance where
Louise
and I sat
pretending we didn’t
care, our socks
fat
with bells and fuzzy
ribbons, silly as we
felt. I
wanted to be
home, wanted the
locked bathroom to
cry in,
knew some
part of me would
never stop waiting
to be
asked to dance
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Dream
of the Pink and Black Lace,
Just Like the Evening Gown
my
favorite in high school,
a dress I’d wanted to
see
marked down and finally wrote
the store, even then,
able
to get what I wanted
more
easily on paper. I
told them how often I’d come
back,
hoping it would be marked
down and dashed up with my
mother
when they agreed
to lower the price.
I
feel the swirl of those
gowns I ran my hand through,
terrified
mine wouldn’t
be there, then carrying it as
carefully
as a baby of blown glass.
It
was so full my waist
looked tiny inside it
with hoops and
an eyelet bustier.
The dress took up half
my mother’s
closet,
less
space than I did in her,
especially after she had me.
I
don’t think I wore it again, too
dressy, too much lace
to pack.
But I can see it near the yellow
and
the pink and white gauzy gowns,
swirling strapless, a part of
38
Main Street I expected to always
be as it was, like my
mother
waiting for me to fill it
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