Before It's Light:

 
Midwest

all that sky
a flat black
with only a cat’s
eye blazing

people wait alone
wind changes in
the cornleaves
people hear it like
a chord augmented
Houses chip slowly
stranded in snow
Only the sky is fast

 

Arizona Ruins

1

Past Mogollon River
        the limestone ruins
scrape it with your finger
           and the floor breaks
                the talc
              must have dusted
            their dark
bodies as they squatted on these
          floors grinding
mesquite and creosote

No one knows
         where they went
    from the cliffs
with their 
       earth jars and sandals

Or if they
cursed the
    desert moon
        as they wrapped
their dead
   babies
           in bright cloth
                 and jewels

2

Now cliff swallows
          nest in the mud
        where the Sinaqua
            lived 
          until water ran out

High in these white cliffs
                      weaving yucca and cotton
             How many nights did they
                 listen for cougar
as they pressed the wet
        rust clay 
                  into bowls

        that they walked
200 miles to trade in Phoenix
        before it was time to leave

        40 years 
         before Columbus


3

Noon in the
caves

it is summer     the
              children are sleeping

The women
      listen to a story
      one of them has heard
      of an ocean

              deerflesh dries in the sun

       they braid
       willow stems
       and don’t look up

      When she
       is done
             they are all
       stoned on what could come
                                     from such water

It is cool and dark
inside here

                                     this was the place

4

The others
have gone to find
salt and red

    stones for earrings

                    the children

climb down

                               look for lizards
                   and nuts he

                   takes the girl he
        wants
                 for the first time

                                       her blood cakes
                                                on the white chalk
floor

                         her thighs

                                                    will make a bracelet
                                                                in his head


5

Desert bees
                  fall thru the wind
           over the pueblos
                         velvet ash and barberry

They still find
                   bodies 
              buried in the wall
                        a child’s bones
                  wrapped in yucca leaves
                             and cotton

bats fly thru the
        ruins now
                scrape the charred
          walls white

                       the people left
              the debris of their lives here
                  arrows, dung
                            and were buried
                         with the bright
                                turquoise they loved
                            sometimes carved
                                into animals and birds

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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