Before It's Light:
chapter: Blaze of Color in a Slash of White

 

Blue Sleighs

December     the
water moves
dark between the
snow dunes in ten
thousand hills
pulling light
around the
black stones, a
sound to sleep
and love by
like bells
running thru the
children’s sleep
when they dream
of blue sleighs

 

Rosh Hodesh

Rosh Hodesh, a holiday celebrating each months’ new moon,
is marked by women as the time for renewal and healing,
a time to look inward and skyward

Behind the dark
roses, she steps
into new shoes
in a room the
moon wouldn’t
reach, even if
it had enough
light. She
smoothes silk
over her belly.
Deeper than
sheknows,
something is
starting over.
She prays no
one will hear
how she once
wanted not
to go on,
now waits for
the blood not
to soak into
cotton as her
father’s did,
falling into his
face in the
snow, wonders if
it is a boy,
she could name
it for him

*

The moon could
be the sea,
washing days
slowly from her
in its waves.
She starts
again, even in
the light the
moon’s like
clockhands
in a drawer she
can’t open,
running, running
out. The month
is water. She
has tried
sea walls, has
tried to root
but feels the
past move from
under her,
the new moon like
a lover’s breath
begging her to
start over


*

A woman steps out
of water as if she
walked out of
her own skin,
became an angel
floating over
books and walls.
Night air catches
her hair like
passion that
survives the every
day and flowers,
flames into fire
no one can bank or
burn out. In the
new moon she
stands at the river,
her breasts melons
no one’s touched,
damp as the first wild
flowers, bloodroot,
arbutus, bleeding heart

 

 

from the book Before It's Light
 
  
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

---

     Lyn Lifshin has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A., and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. She has given more than 700 readings across the U.S.A. and has appeared at Dartmouth and Skidmore colleges, Cornell University, the Shakespeare Library, Whitney Museum, and Huntington Library. Lyn Lifshin has also taught poetry and prose writing for many years at universities, colleges and high schools, and has been Poet in Residence at the University of Rochester, Antioch, and Colorado Mountain College. Winner of numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac Award for her book Kiss The Skin Off, Lyn is the subject of the documentary film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. For her absolute dedication to the small presses which first published her, and for managing to survive on her own apart from any major publishing house or academic institution, Lifshin has earned the distinction "Queen of the Small Presses." She has been praised by Robert Frost, Ken Kesey and Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders has seen her as " a modern Emily Dickinson."

A New Film About a Woman in Love with the Dead

     Almost every woman I know has had at least one heart-wrenching experience with a "bad news" boyfriend, and Lyn Lifshin is no exception. In this new collection of 103 poems she chronicles her own relationship with such a man, one who happened to be a popular radio personality, yet possessed a chilly heart. She tells her tale in a sequence of poems that reads like a novel, spanning the length of the relationship from beginning to end, including a period of time years later when she learns he has died of cancer....

Laura Stamps

book reviews w/basinski:

• Cold Comfort • Before It's Light

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