before he wrote
his words were
tangling, a tiara
in her alive,
alive with his
words, his touch.
Even on paper,
even years past
the blue blues,
transformed
but still like the
string of lights
near where she is
writing this even
after what they
were like jewels
for, sapphires
in the water's
darkest places
I wouldn't have worn them,
suspicious enough to not
wear what wasn't for me.
(Not that I hadn't imagined
holding what I shouldn't).
Pale ovals, with just a
glimmer of wildness where
you almost can't see
pasted to my ivory skin
they'd disappear. Milky as
afternoons in Vermont
when my mother took them
out to show me and then
locked them away. The man
who always loved her must
have had a woman they
were the birthstone for. What
ever he could give my mother
he brought up from Plymouth:
Oriental rugs, a little worn
but hanging on to beauty
as, in his eyes, my mother
had. In my house with
brass globes whose chunks
of glass twist sun, transform
like a gone lover's voice.
To wear the opals would
have been a dare but neither
my mother nor I have
pieced lobes. The earrings
nestle in blue velvet, follow
me from house to house,
seem to wait to be given to
someone who could love them.
They shimmer like the light
in my mother's face retelling
the story of what different
boyfriends had brought her,
lilacs filling her room
and the fur coat, left when
one man's wife died, like ghost
breath or snow filling night,
snow crystals to lie in the
rapture of knowing what
can't stay still catches your heart
walking into the dance studio,
the most drab day, one of those
typical Albany gray mist blah
days you wish the sun would
finally set. An afternoon I would
not have imagined anything
could glisten after such blahness
then someone comes up from
behind and touches my shoulder.
We start to dance but in the
next frame, the others dissolve
and we are dancing in air.
Where my clothes went to, a
mystery like everything about
this night but in his arms, I
feel as sexy as I did last time
in Venice: waves and exotic
dissolving domes. When I write
this down I think of Da Vinci's man
floating naked thru centuries. If
this man had a name, its as
blurred as gold Venetian from
the plane. His body, with those
feet, how could he not be
a dancer, not the kind with a
harem of babes but it was as if
he was pure dance and beauty. I
suppose his penis was lovely too
but like what I read in NYT,
women surveyed did not find
penises attractive. But yes,
his must have been nice. But it
was his buttocks, the most
incredible ass, globes no one
could resist, wood hard, two
perfect suns that would light up
any room. And they were mine. I
might be generous enough to
share them but he wouldn't
leave me waiting on a bench,
waiting for him to want me.
When he held me, it was enough
but his lips promised this was
a long novel, a trilogy, but the
opposite of Crime and Punishment.
It would go on and on and when
others saw him walking past
Starbucks or Cosi, a gasp at his
beauty like in Austin where at least
four women gasped, "a hunk" as
I slid past with a much less
reliable beauty. Then, somehow,
in the last frame, as if to leave
the night with a special omen, I'm
led into a room like a tiny version of
the Guggenheim or the Holocaust
Museum where there's a tower of
photographs of a whole town of
murdered Jews, in Vilnia, smiling,
gorgeous and young, still caught as I
feel even after disaster, all the artwork
in my house hidden in drawers and
boxes, flat and dusty as the light
has been in me. There, palpable
beautiful in a whole new light
Lyn Lifshin's Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow in 2006 and selected for the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. Also out in 2006 was The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian from Texas Review Press. Lifshin's recent books include Before It's Light (Black Sparrow, 2000), Cold Comfort (Black Sparrow, 1997), In Mirrors (Presa Press), Upstate: An Unfinished Story (Foot Hills) and The Daughter I Don't Have (Plan B Press). Her poems have appeared in most literary and poetry magazines and she is the subject of a film, Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass, from Women Make Movies. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com.