Lyn Lifshin
On the Morning After Missing the Red Shoes
Tracks in first snow, something running for its life like a ballet dancer who can’t stop, whose shoes are her, or a horse running on bloody legs, wild for the finish line. Snow adorns seed pods, hangs from a sweet gum tree. Winter blues. Where you can’t see something in me is that dancer’s blood and something under bones, the horse no one could pull up where you can’t see, longing is overflowing what held it
The Family Shoe
Or was it stone? Or shore? Scratched in the dark near the bed in blackness when I was sure it meant everything that mattered, like lips after too much wine that, in the light, don’t even seem familiar. Family shoe? I couldn’t have been thinking of the old lady living in one with more kids than she could handle? Or shore? The family as a cove? Something I too rarely felt, often the opposite. But family stone? In the light all I can think of is grave stone, not ruby, the jewel my sister and I share, all we share these days. Or “store.” There was one once and now it isn’t, Lazarus Dept. overlooking the rail tracks, the creek and the 5 to Dime with its spiral staircase my sister and I hid in the clutter of, too young yet to wait on snobby Cape Dunmore brats from the city who wanted Ship ‘n Shore blouses and shorts I refolded hour after hour unaware of my tight perfect skin I’d later mourn and long for, only looking ahead for when things would be different
Sometimes it Takes So Little
There was the one who took in a diabetic skinny stray, that was enough for me to want him. Or the one whose parents knew Dylan Thomas, had him as a guest. He hugged the blues. That one held me, stained me with that darkness, played Sea Sea Rider as he told me he had just heard two new folk singers in the city, Baez and Dylan. Story tellers seem to get to me. And the ones with a leg lost in Nam, that will do it. I was a door mat to his voice, knocked my knuckles raw trying to get thru to him. I never felt safe until he was dead tho his grave has followed me south. He is probably spinning magic under this first new snow at Arlington Cemetery. And what can I do with another man I’m haunted by who writes such small e-mails I can imagine whatever I want out of them but now I’m knocked down by his stories. Sure it is icy and dicey and I’m walking a tight rope walk over spiked glass but when he writes of mesquite and cedar, the perfume of agarita blossoms in starlight I twist from the one who wants to keep me in his bed. I’m Texas bound under curly hair in search of this exotic with his dogs, rough hands and gun in the cold of January, ache for shimmery heat a coast away by stories I have no clue where they’ll end
Lyn Lifshin has published over 125 books and chapbooks, given over 700 readings and edited four anthologies of women’s writing. Her collection Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was selected for the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Persephone was published by Red Hen Press in October 2008. For other books and information, see her Web site: lynlifshin.com
