Six by Lyn Lifshin

AS THE LAST NESTS FALL

12 days before the darkest,
what held blood and feathers
unravels, ice blown from
the pond, comes undone

unravels as a woman
who gets bad news,
her days darkening faster.
Hieroglyphs in the wind

nothing still living can translate

#

222 JACKSON AVENUE

I still thought
the tumbleweed would

remember me, the
willow arrange her skirt

and only one blood maple.
Each day, life

was in the rear view mirror.
My uncles with tennis

clothes, my sister’s
bangs. I was never wild.

I only imagined that
on paper,

moved as if under water,
untouched

#

222 JACKSON AVE

there, at 1:45 I
pull the quilt closer
as if arms that
could do what
none left can.
The cat stretches
on my lap. I think
of how she said
“if you can’t
sleep honey, call
me, it will be like
a pajama party.”
I wonder who was
lonelier

#

HAZE OF ROSE LACE

how many years,
Japanese plum
petals unsticking
themselves from
themselves, a
chrysalis

a delicate
assembly of
flesh tones
and mauves

seductive as
skin under
silk and gauze

How many years
since you?

How many more?

#

BAD DREAM # 2791

it stings, it’s the
way salt clings after
a dip in the Atlantic.
The old Vt house,
its enormous from the
first frame on,
abandoned at the
edges. On the top
floor, my mother is
dead. It can’t be her
my heart is insisting.
She has to be here.
In the room the
piano I sold is still
untouched, waiting.
The sister, -- sister
no more—is the
only other person in
this house some
walls have washed
away from. Spaces
on stilts, air and
sea, snow could fall
thru. Nothing is
rooted. My sister
even is a ghost. No
thing seems to be
important enough to
matter except terror
that I didn’t go to
see my mother more

#

WITH YOU, IT WAS NEVER LATIN

nothing that fiery,
nothing like a mambo,
nothing as flaming.
With you it wasn’t a
wild free dance
but restrained,
something always
held back. Like any
dancer about to
collapse I smiled thru
the agony, the rises,
the falls and because I
concentrated so on
keeping our frame
strong, my head back
leaning to the left
and away from you,
away from your eyes,
past your ears I
never knew what
you were thinking.
I could only follow