That Summer Spirea Dripped Like Snow and Doors Clanged
uncles coming and going.
There were brownies
in the pantry, someone
singing in the lilac
room that smelled of
talcum and Yardley’s.
Gramp like a little
weasel in the sloped
room that was always
locked and my grand
mother with her
elephants of ivory,
sighing, trying to
sleep. My mother must
have curled up on the
couch. Two months
like a Norman Rockwell
cover for the Saturday
Evening Post before the
fire and cancer and my
mother being locked
out of the house, each
heart padlocked, long
before my sister won’t
talk and stucco’s torn
off the wall, the kitten
becoming an old sick
abscessed cat and what
seemed to hold and warm
like my grandmother’s
rainbow afghan, unravels,
loses its gold and green
Reading the Poem My Cousin Wrote That I Hadn’t
I didn’t know she
watched men watch
me walking, thought
I was beautiful
When we kiss she
wrote we come close
but we kiss air.
I haven’t seen her
for seven years. I
never read the poem
about sleeping together
in the lake house
before my wedding,
never heard her say,
“I want to put my
arms around my
cousin and kiss the
night from her”
That August 24
the black cat dozed in the sun
on the screened porch, my
grandmother in the kitchen
before she stopped getting
out of the chair with the
afghan over her like a shroud.
Only my mother slipped
back to the rooms she pulled
us from like people leaving
a burning building, hearing
the stairs tear. My father’s
silhouette against a TV news
had dissolved from. In town,
she’d tell us to keep the car
windows rolled. “Don’t do
anything you don’t want to,”
my father said the one time
he spoke when I ran into him
near the Post Office, another
face among the wanted. I
wanted my life to be like
those new dresses that had
never been in my old lilac
room, didn’t smell of smoke
from old fires. When I invited
my father to the wedding he
hung up, said he didn’t want to
be involved or pay. I thought
I was leaving what didn’t fit,
like old clothes. It was months
before I’d admit I’d never
learn to play the guitar I wanted
so badly, or learn to play what
we had called love
In the Negatives
Where no one touching or
Close to anybody else
Still is, the pale lips
Smiling are ghostly
As fingers linked with
Other skin they’d jolt
From now. If this was
A film run fast forward,
My sister would walk
Away, her smile down
Loaded to a frown her
Shoulders, fall from
Mine. It is years
Before my mother starts
Falling on the stairs
She used to take
3 at a time. My sister’s
dead dog is still a puppy
with both eyes. The car
that he tries to merge
with hasn’t come off the
assembly line, the
paint that will cover
it still not mixed.
Maybe we all glance at
The dog to avoid looking
Straight ahead at what
Is coming. If there are
Clues of how my sister
And I will stop talking
They are in code: the
Exact closeness of our
Shoulders seems ordinary
As the way, with our pale
Milk Maid lipstick saying
Goodbye, we leaned into each
Other, just kissed air
Smoothing Out My Sister
Now a wad, a
fist of rage
hidden like a
growth in a
rib, making
a nuisance as
she wakes in
nightmares
screaming,
pulling on
my heart and
fastening her
claws in where
I can’t reach.
to unclench her
hold, like
unfastening
fingers of the
electrocuted,
or gassed, who
cling in blue
shadows, frozen
in grotesque
positions
After the Visit
flat blue hills
yellow light
November in the
old house the
walls pull from
the floor she
barely knows me
or my voice stained
Chinese carpet
my grandmother
wrapped in
blue sheets
on the chair where
her old man sat
and stopped her
from singing 60
years, now under
the blanket in
her own dark
singing you are
my the midnight
leaves, her arms
growing smaller
sunshine my only
My Sister, Re-Reading 32 Years of Diaries
not like the book of
life where deaths and births
are sealed but a film
run backward, a woman
pulling away from
arms and lips and skin,
letting go, swirling
backward, curled as
an embryo, she locks her
self in the bathroom
apartment of stained lilac
as water crashes against
ragged stone. The black
pines bend over like my
sister in the dark room in
the rain. She is 36, 18, 8,
becoming thinner, laughing.
The pages open like a rose,
the words a rose pressed
on a night moon licked her
skin, translucent as her
long blonde hair. From here,
that nymph is a stranger.
Like the rose, the words
lose their color, spaces
fill with blurred nights. But
the leaves, fragile and thin,
ghosts of what was,
smell of something lush in
darkness. In the rain my
sister curls into the quilt
made of time and loss,
pulls the past as far into
Junes to come as she can
My Uncle, in the Bed He was Born in 70 Years Ago
can still watch the yellow roses
thru glass that’s as much a moat
as the years. Two hours away, I
find the postcard he sent me from
Schroon Manor, Screw Manor, my
sister and I giggled before we knew
what that meant, wondering if any
of the many Rhodas and Helens,
dark-haired girls who came to my
grandmother’s house, dressed and
lipsticked for breakfast, as if trying
out for some part in a play they’d
change their lines, do anything to
come back to stay, would. Except for
the oxygen pump and the nurse
aide padding up the long mahogany
stairs where I sat on the landing,
listened to grownups thru glass
French doors, let the chunks of
cherry and lime and pineapple
glass in the brass-leaded dome
dazzle and hypnotize, little seems
changed. Like my mother, my
uncle is shriveling. His “can’t
complain” becomes a raspy “been
better days.” The army fatigues
he is wearing near the peony bush
in a 1940’s photo would hang over
bones that jut up like chairs in the
living room covered with a sheet.
He stays upstairs in the bed where
my grandmother slept next to the
room I shook in, four, terrified of
wasps buzzing in a corner when my
mother was rushed to the hospital
for my sister to be born. Without any
children, he waits for my call, night
full of dark wings, ghosts of the
women he let go. He wants to
remember sweet ones from St. Louis
and Wilkes-Barre, wants to tell me
the story of the dance on the mansion
where the prettiest one left her
Harvard beau and whispered, “Stanton,
you’re the one I always wanted,” and
how after that, when her parents didn’t
think he was good enough and so young,
he vowed never to let anyone so deep
under his skin. “Do you remember,” I
ask, wild for something safer and my
uncle comes back with a story of a ”size
6 Keds, sneaker, dark blue.” Now his old
department store’s moved around the
alley and the antique cash register melted
in flame, the dark cellar where a traveling
salesman asked my mother if she’d like a
merry widow and began putting his fingers
inside her dress now is filled with books
and the other half of the divided store
sells hardware. My uncle’s room goes
dusky plum, orchid, lavender. There is no
shoe department with boxes piled tall as
trees my sister and I hid in, like tunnel
people, making a house out of cardboard
and orange crates. The clerks don’t limp
in in any kind of weather like Mr. Goss and
Jesse Jarvis. In summer, before air conditioning,
when fans blew the tabs over Ship ‘N’ Shore
blouses, my uncle put the awnings down and
the aisles were a stage. I grabbed a pink pique
halter dress I never thought I’d be thin enough
to get away with. The pale mannequins rapt as
my uncle grabbed a straw hat and we do-si-do’d
in the three-way mirror, six of the two of us
honoring our corners and allemanding thru
checked house dresses that ladies caught their
flesh in, collapsing, laughing in warm rose
and tar wind
Seeing Someone Else Who Looks Like My Sister
Usually it’s
on the metro,
someone on foot,
taller but in a
dress she might
have picked, a
green sweater
maybe smelling
faintly of horses.
her hair’s
blonde still,
her eyes green
as rosemary that
blooms all year,
frozen like the
moment two sisters
are thrown from
the roof of a
high rise to
pavement then
blurring like
strands of
rain as subway
doors close,
slam in whatever
direction I’m
not going
from my new book:
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
