Before It's Light:
chapter: Blaze of Color in a Slash of White

 

On the Other Coast of the Sea: Plymouth Diaries

washing for some
man who isn’t hers

kicking herring
bones in the fire

The small room
smells like a fish

Fish bones cut her
knees, she kneels

to sew closer to
the light. Patches

on patches, not even
the house her own.

Strange seeds blow
over the frozen

ground like rice
at a wedding, a

diary in her blood
writing

the winters seem darker here,
oak leaves like hail.
Dead grow quartz crystals
under the snow. Wolves thru
the daubing, the dying still
taste salt. Spiders freeze
in our water at night
the sea boils. I
miss but nothing is
lost. We are like sand
taken from one part,
added to another.
Only I feel like a
grain worn so smooth
nothing more can…

*

mist in the valley.
The children sleep,
goat’s milk on their
faces. A woman sprinkling
rose leaves in the linen
remembers being packed
in the boat, her mouth
bleeding. Learning to wait
like frogs in iced mud,
moving toward summer
that quietly. She thinks
of alewives, silver,
their greyish green blending
with what’s around them, not
knowing a stick from an
eel unless attacked.
Schooling and eating.
Not having babies.
She thinks hw the
solitary alewife is
lost and shuts her eyes
can feel his tongue,

breath of wine. She

twists in a blanket
stuffed with wool.
Wool adders. For

adultery, how
many lashes

Something so quick,
poison, mushrooms. The
pine needles under them.
Flowers of darkness,
trembling of a loon

Shivering, she dreams
whips on her buttocks

her nipples rotting
on some beach

*

low tide

tiny black snails moving
over the flats

fish in the tidepools

mint on her skin, the
seeds carried
from Leyden

sand burns
under a nail

grains shifting,
pollen on the water

the sun, her belly
straining against the
cloth that keeps
getting tighter

*

sick room, borning
room. Dark chest

a room 6 x 6

thyme to take a dead child
away, basil for pain

A woman wondering how
seallows know where
they’ll end p

nails thru the wood

That other woman, shipped out
for living from her husband

sent somewhere on a
boat, the mark
on her clothes

Stories of bodies left

to rot as a warning

Fear sews her teeth together

none of her mouths seem like hers

Then the baby’s head, a bloody plum

Dark house, sun, lilies

cecily, thick horehound,
sorel, mint

shadows

this dark touching
some young girl’s loose
hair who stopped, put
mullein in her shoe
to become a

woman in a
hurry, wanting
a man

before earth put its
mouth on her

*

afternoon, watching the
sea eat the sun.
Candle wax on his
fingers, a

whole warehouse
of candles to
burn for years
in the west like
light from a star

Salt wind blows up
from the harbor,
frozen reeds creak
in the march. He

locks the door,
hurries along Main
Street past his
shop of dragons, jade
to where the children
are lighting the oil,
scraping names

in the frost. Ashes
blow back into
the room, paper
dragons, branches

scraping the moon
with icy antlers

*

a closet of
pale
dresses

whites, blues, some
yellows. Clothes

like arms reaching,
trying to pull some
thing back. Put

them on. You could
probably smell the lilac
that drifted in thru
the maples as

tea was poured in
to rose cups
on the cool
marble table

clothes smaller than most
women could wear now

the waist 18 inches

9 children in the
shadow of this sloped

yellow drew

the Mayflower,
relatives who
died at sea

China a dream,
letters on thin
paper. Dolls

dressed as small
women and men

a child’s tiny cross

sleds that criss
crossed in the
snow until the

children’s names
became like a
drawer of bones

 

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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