New Mexico

moon on their shoulders
they set out west toward the
water they’d known
in a dream

rattled peach stones in a
jar, they willed the
deer, blue
palo verde

men threw rabbit skin
in front of the white cliffs,
slipped into the stone

women gave their
nipples to babies still
wrapped in leaves

sun, hot
wind the river
soothing their bones
like blood

it was this
quiet

*

hair unbound
for magic

you can tell a woman’s
age by the 
way she wears her hair

the kind of flowers

married women with their
hair bound, singing
on flat stones

waving, grinding

rainbow girls with

braided hair painted
on the sand

near the fire
green branches

men letting their hair
flow long to coax the rain

*

in the red leaves
listening for some
thing to move

still as stone
the fox sniffing
for mice eggs

waiting

nothing moves

 a dream of fat 
snakes closes
his eyes like
pennies, changes

to a dream of
being hunted for food

tail twisting
under cold stars,
corn dust soaks
into his pelt

*

Lake Valley limestone

gardens of
seals and lilies
skeletons webbed with

lacy moss, coral

Giant dragonflies and
spiders swam over the land

At the base of the
hill, listen for
waves, for some

sea animal tossing.
Red water
a shell on the reef

like something in code

*
at Zuni

washing their 
hair in yucca suds

hair growing between
their thighs
then blood,
babies

naturally with
little fear

They like men
who could tell
stories, keep
their cool

few feared the dead

Grief deep under
mahogany skin

the most beautiful pots
broken in the grave

*

looking for water
    they left the pueblo

               moved to frijoles canyon

          found a creek that
     flowed all year

                                  green beans
              on the canyon floor they

                         honeycombed the 
                                                     cliff

                   the walls so soft
even a child could
       dig with his fingers

                         wove cotton, the
              sun on their faces

          glazed this clay

until something with a
       huge mouth

                    moved into
         their houses



Early, Last Day of June

Leaf musk, cardinals. 
Jade presses screens. 
Night moths pleat 
into themselves 
like skirts from 
the fifties. 
Sun tea on slate. 
Blue sandals left 
near my mother's 
bed. Spackle of 
branches' shadow 
on redwood. Rode 
wind. The young 
girl across the 
street parading 
her body like 
a ruby                            

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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