Sunday

we sleep right together
listen to leaves. He
says his fingers
get cold from
playing, slips
them in my hair

listening in the
sheets to my
woman is water

do all men who
play guitar

get such
beauty from wood

I wonder slipping
my hand into where
he never wears underpants,

wanting to be
that warm



---

Burning Poems

The small ones
go up easy, dry
and light, full
of spaces

take at least
6 if you want
to catch your wood

sit back in the
chair, drink the
scotch, turn out
the light and
read my

but I know you
can’t wait to
get to you

Well the ones
that you’re in
are big, they
flare up like
lemon trees in
California, a

whole orchard
burning all night
and into summer

---

After the Reading the Color is Blue

paler than bruise blue,
more a no valentine on
Valentine’s Day
bluesy teal. Color of
strung sapphire beads
or the lightest
shadow of veins,
a blue Thursday and
Friday no longer waiting
for any phone. Blue at
4:45. February. Ice
moves east but leaves
the lint of opals. Blue
without faces. Blue in
the icy sheets in the
flannel that only my’
own arms wrapped around
me warms. I wanted a
jade tongue. But
it’s blue afterward,
a blue paint no flesh or
guava covers. Blue as
Drano or herons or
Ophelia’s last
underwater bubbling
through blue lips,
her fingers
already blue

---

Moving by Touch

that afternoon an
unreal amber
light 4 o’clock the
quietness of
oil February blue
bowls full of
oranges we were
spreading honey, butter
on new bread our
skin nearly
touching
Even the dark wood glowed

---

Snake Dance

I rub one bullet
I’ve ever held against

my lips, put on his
old Confederate jacket

We eat hardtack covered
with gold vermillion

high on an Iroquois
spell we make each

other tremble (I could
be doing that snake

dance knowing about
things that bite and

what happens later, still
taking them into my mouth)

---

from my new book:
  
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."