Lyn Lifshin

Champlain, Branbury, The Lakes At Night always women in the dark on porches talking as if in blackness their secrets would be safe. Cigarettes glowed like Indian paintbrush. Water slapped the deck. Night flowers full of things with wings, something you almost feel like the fingers of a boy moving, as if by accident, under sheer nylon and felt in the dark movie house as the chase gets louder, there and not there, something miscarried that maybe never was. The mothers whispered about a knife, blood. Then, they were laughing the way you sail out of a dark movie theater into wild light as if no thing that happened happened       Top of the Page.	Lake Champlain We could hear Louis Armstrong if the wind blew right. Across the lake, we listened to the baby sitter's stories of what they did to children in Germany in the tunnels, my mother's cigarette, a firefly on the porch across the dark jade grass, a night light. I imagined hair straight as the girl at the rink with one green eye, one blue one, her gaze hypnotic as the stories of what people might do. I didn't know what might uncoil in the night. Or that, though I felt I was storing up sun, catching light like minnows, in the fall ahead there wouldn't be one night I didn't wake up screaming in dreams of fire       Top of the Page.
Sitting In The Brown Chair With Lets Pretend On The Radio I don't think how the m and m's that soothe only made my fat legs worse. I'm not thinking how my mother will die, of fires that could gulp a mother up. leave me like Bambi. I'm not going over the baby sitter's stories of what they did to young girls in tunnels, of the ovens and gas or have nightmares I'll wake up screaming for one whole year wanting someone to lie near me, hold me as if from then on no one can get close enough. I don't hear my mother and father yelling, my mother howling that if he loved us he'd want to buy a house, not stay in the apart- ment he doesn't even pay her father rent for but get a place we wouldn't be ashamed to bring friends. What I can drift and dream in is more real. I don't want to leave the world of golden apples and silver geese. To make sure, I close my eyes, make a wish on the first hay load of summer then wait until it disappears       Top of the Page.	Going To The Catholic School once a year, bundled in wool pea coats and snow pants, mufflers dotted with ice crystals tightly around our faces so the incense we were sure would be too thick to breathe in wouldn't make us sneeze. Under our snow pants, soft corduroy jeans and our thickest gloves, covered mittens: we had heard about rulers smashing bones and skin, that patent leather shoes were forbidden. Something about the stained glass light on the pale nuns with enormous crosses and rosaries kept us huddled and close, walking with only side- long glances at the Jesus with bleeding chest, as scary as The Thing where Jessica, whose father was a minister, shrieked when the blob filled the screen. We didn't know why the Catholic girls couldn't come to our school but would come later, in high school. Or why everything had a smell we never smelled anywhere else, wondered how we'd ever catch up in Latin when we had to. The dark haired girls with their dangling faces of Mary they kissed before a ball game and tests seemed as exotic as what was hidden under their white confirmation dresses, flesh later we heard would writhe and twist and do the wild thing since it would be ok once they confessed       Top of the Page.
Some Winters Champlain Froze always with places where the ice was too soft to hold the cars that flaunted their metal. Otter Falls grew thick crusty beards of ice. St Mary's against the salmon sky. Walking over the bridge was freezing. I wanted stories of my father in a cold hut in Russia without radios like ours, only wind and the chickens. I wanted a story of sleeping in straw with horses' breath for a fire, of silver moon, black pines       Top of the Page.	First Day Of School my mother in the doorway getting smaller as she would, a kite burning my palm as the wind jolts it from me, a thud in my belly that even at six wasn't flat as I'd like it to be. Mrs. Butterfield, a ship that could take me where my mother wouldn't go like a flotilla of lovers, steaming closer as if she could block what I was leaving behind, my mother in a worn coat already counting the hours       Top of the Page.
Lying Out In The Fields Where There'd Be Wild Strawberries only the leaves that March afternoon, the sun a glow we hardly saw the months of snow. We lay on our backs. No, I told my mother later, the ground was dry. Birds all around, dandelions we opened already the palest color of sun. My green parka on the lush green hill, our eyes closed, smelling the smell of things growing: hair, summer and tho by mid afternoon, we'd shiver in the shade, our skin stayed pink, sun kissed this early       Top of the Page.	Some Afternoons When Nobody Was Fighting my mother took out walnuts and chocolate chips. My sister and I plunged our fingers in flour and butter smoother than clay. Pale dough oozing between our fingers while the house filled with blond bars rising. Mother in her pink dress with black ballerinas circling its bottom turned on the Victrola, tucked her dress up into pink nylon bloomer pants, kicked her legs up in the air and my sister and I pranced thru the living room, a bracelet around her. She was our Pied Piper and we were the children of Hamlin, circling her as close as the dancers on her hem       Top of the Page.
Nights It Was Too Hot To Stay In The Apartment We drove to the lake, then stopped at my grandmother's. The grownups sat in the screened porch on wicker or the glider whispering above the clink of ice in wet glass. Spirea and yellow roses circled the earth under stars. A silver apple moon. Bored and still sweaty, my sister and I wanted to sleep out on the lawn and dragged out our uncle's army blankets and chairs for a tent. We wanted the stars on our skin, the small green apples to hang over the blanket to protect us from bats. From the straw mats, peonies glowed like planets and if there was a breeze, it was roses and sweat. I wanted our white cats under the olive green with us, their tongues snapping up moths and whatever buzzed thru the clover. For an hour the porch seemed miles away until itchy with bug bites and feeling our shirts fill with night air, my hair grow curlier, our mother came to fold up the blankets and chairs and I wished I was old enough to stay alone until dawn or small enough to be scooped up, asleep in arms that would carry me up the still hot apartment stairs and into sheets I wouldn't know were still warm until morning       Top of the Page.

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