Lyn Lifshin

Maui Bad Dream

I’m flung back, like palm fronds
in rose and guava wind

to five years ago.
It could have been this
same day. I

walked out from Hui Nuis,
ants were a necklace around
the bed like
dark stones

Sun burned thru blue haze.
In Vermont my mother was shriveling.
I was sure, like the bamboo and
camellias, if I brought her
here, she’d flourish in the sun

and wrote her postcards each day,
imagined swooping her up
from the room half underground in Stowe,

a just born, an
almost-mummy, bring her
to the musk of this
blue light world

like adding water
to dried petals,
pull her back to the living.

I saw us under the banyan,
nothing to scorch or chill

but like a rare cure from the
rain forests, the sea air would
turn her white hair ebony again
in this pineapple wind
where she’d doze and wake ravenous

Venice Daphne Run Backwards

the way that sandpiper runs
as close to the water
and then knows, pulls
back, but not
before he’s dug
into sea grass. I’m
walking out of branches,
wood, Daphne
run backwards, my own
breakwater this time.
Blue shells, sun
cupped in the arm of some
one who doesn’t own
or want to own me.
The leaves he pulls from
my skin are stained
with the verbs of someone
who didn’t see what she could.
Salt air chews them.
We dream of Nantucket,
wine in a gray wood
someday. You know I never
wanted a man just
for myself
but didn’t know that.
Gulls. Old women
unbutton black coats,
feel the light, dreams moving
in their throat like birds.
They are willow roots
hanging on under
the sand, pushing deep.
In this light, if they
were to unloosen a few
pins they would grow into
their hair, birds blown in the
sun toward cities rarely
found on maps

~~~~~~~~

Recent books from Lyn Lifshin: THE LICORICE DAUGHTER: MYYEAR WITH RUFFIAN, Texas Review Press, ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME from Black Sparrow at Godine., following COLD COMFORT and BEFORE IT’S LIGHT, DESIRE and 92 RAPPLE. She has over 120 books & edited 4 anthologies.   Also out recently: NUTLEY POND, PERSEPHONE, BARBARO: BEYOND BROKENNESS, LOST IN THE FOG, LIGHT AT THE END, JESUS POEMS and BALLET MADONNAS, KATRINA, LOST HORSES. forthcoming: CHIFFON, ALL THE POETS WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME, LIVING AND DEAD. ALL TRUE: ESPECIALLY THE LIES and BALLROOM. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com