Some Poems by Lyn Lifshin In This Old Notebook in the middle of what I thought were unused pages: the name of my ex-husband’s daughter: a beauty, dark with a name I might have chosen but startling on a class list she signed, a workshop writing about war. I want to be poet like you she grinned at break, her father’s worst nightmare. I think of what I’ve said about him in books, how he saw me as some mare who wouldn’t take the bit, wouldn’t jump. But that’s a lie. I was the one lunging for his ankles out the door like a thrown rider in reins, skin as rubbed raw, deep rose as her name or sign in. In the book her name was Rachel. She didn’t look like him. She didn’t pay Green Fringe each day, pale green camouflages branches, a lace birds soon could nest in. Only the late maple’s bare, Christmas lights dangling. Some where the beaver is plotting, geese nest in tall grass. Think of 3 things to be happy for he said, I’ll call at noon to check Sylvia, On the Refrigerator resembling all the women I wanted to be, onyx hair and a look of not being quite where she wanted to be. She could double for Mrs Berge, the ballet teacher some thought to be French tho she was Berger. High cheek bones, skin calla lily pale. Slim women, haughty women. Or maybe somewhere else when talking to you: in some park in Berlin, doing choreography for the Metropolitan, a pas de deux to erase how they were treated in the old country. Sylvia is as distant. You can tell she’d rather be some where else, in a Josh Logan play again, not with short, chubby Howie with his small town department store. It’s not enough her house is a theater, ebony, snow and blood. If you look at some angles you’ll see the look of disdain I learned from her, dying to move toward a man, an audience. The simple thrill of my long white arms enough Now When I Don't Want You Blues you catch a whiff of rose and our knees crumble I’d like to say it took one night for you to call but it’s been years You did the work, making me up as you wanted. Then, you said I whined. I drank too much. You’ve even got the color of my dress wrong: I never wear orange. But if it pleases you, I’ll play along like any woman faking orgasm. You think my cheetah thighs, yours then, were the silkiest, my mouth a national treasure. There was danger you write, my high heels so close to your face. So what if I was in ballet shoes or sandals.                         Home