by LYN LIFSHIN
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a much more rare obsession than mine, tho in some ways, not that different. The woman in love with what’s dead, what’s given up on breathing, caring, could be me knocking my knuckles raw on your metal door while you gulp another beer, put your head down on the table. With you, it often was like singing to someone in a casket the lid was already down on, still expecting something. She buried animals in the woods, didn’t mind touching them. Though I made our nights into something more, I could have been coiled close to a corpse. No, that part is a lie. Your body was still warm. It was everything inside where your heart must have been that was rigid, ice. The woman in the film went to work, an embalming assistant. Isn’t that what I’m doing? Keeping you with words? Embracing you on the sheet of this paper, a tentative kiss on cold lips, the cuddling of cadavers? In the film, the woman says loving the dead is “like looking into the sun without going blind, is like diving into a lake, sudden cold, then silence.” She says it was addictive. I know about the cold and quiet afterward, how you were a drug. If she was spellbound by the dead, who would say I wasn’t, trying to revive, resuscitate someone not alive, who couldn’t feel or care with only the shell of the body. Here, where no body can see, I could be licking your dead body driving thru a car wash. I could be whispering to the man across the aisle, “bodies are addictive.” Our word for the loved and the dead are the same, the beloved, and once you had either while you have them, you don’t need any other living people in your life |
Lyn Lifshin's Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow at David Godine October, 2006. (Also out in 2006, her prize winning book about the famous, short lived beautiful race horse, Ruffian: The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian from Texas Review Press. Lifshin’s other books include Before it’s Light published winter 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997 and 92 Rapple from Coatism.: Lost in the Fog and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness and Light at the End, the Jesus Poems, Katrina, Ballet Madonnas, Light at the End, Tsunami as History, Lost horse, Drifting, Mirrors. For other books, bio, photographs see her web site:: www.lynlifshin.com Persephone was published by Red Hen and Texas Review published Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Most recent books: Ballroom, All the Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially the Lies. Recently out, Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems. Just out October 1, 2013, NYQ Books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. And also out in November 2013 Tangled as the Alphabet: The Istanbul Poems. Also recently out: For the Roses poems after Joni Mitchell. Just published Hitchcock Hotel. Also forthcoming: Secretariat: The Red Freak, the Miracle; Malala,AND JUST OUT: The Tangled Alphabet: Istanbul Poems and Luminous women: Eneduanna, Scheherazade and Nefertiti and an E book of Marilyn Monroe from Rubber Boots Press and a dvd of the film Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. Also forthcoming: 2002-2013 update to Gale Research autobiography series, Lips, Blues, Blue lace: On the Outside. www.lynlifshin.com Lyn's poem The Jesuit is Writing Around appears in the December 2013 issue of HelloHorror.
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