Before It's Light:
chapter: Blaze of Color in a Slash of White

 

NORTH

breath steaming
beneath a moon
brought from
Asia, walking
in the blue cold
hundreds of miles
for soapstone, the
snow crunching from
Alaska to Labrador,
cold coming thru
the grass stuffed
in their shoes,
they must have
thought: smoke,
seal skin, that
flesh inside a
woman’s thigh
to stop freezing

*

the old often
changed their
names to bring
summer into
their bodies

they left warm
blood in the
snow for the
soul in animals’
bones, in teeth,

clams or
quartz crystals
on a hill shaped
like a man’s
face so the
earth’s soul might
be touched by sun

*

hunting sea otters thru

the ice at breathing
holes, shivering, numb.
All life linked with
animals whose souls
could be charmed
with ivory dolls,
the red blessing.
But if you
kill more animals
than you need
the sun goes away

*

the dead live in an
underground that is not
very happy, like this
world but darker.
They are hungry there
too, their one joy
seeing their soul
in the new baby’s skin

*

children were wanted

were always close
to their parents’

skin even during
fucking. Nobody

put the baby down
except to dip male
babies in the

wind and snow
to make them strong

then close to
the nipple again

*

feels the seal fur

wetting under her, the
smell of burning

blood. She digs into
a bracelet of ivory as
black hair bursts out
from her thighs,
trembling

Nothing else cuts the
blue stillness. The

other women melt snow.
The moon touches the
baby’s tiny penis

She falls back into a
dream of water,
placenta buried in
the earth floor

safe from animals,
umbilical cord in a
caribou skull

to bring joy to
both of them

*

hours waiting
for fish and
seals at blow
holes, a mirror
in front of him
to reflect
only snow. Blue
quiet. Breath
blowing south.
Strange animal
ghosts rising
from the dark
ice, faces of
friends who
climbed up

to the sky.

*

500 pit-like depressions.
There must have been
700 sleeping on these
stone benches. Walls
black with moss and
turf. Nights with the
wind full of animal spirits,
carving skeletons on
ivory bones, a few
human heads. No one
understands what the
chain and swivels mean,
or if the women wept
placing ivory eyes on the
corpse of a frozen child

*

the last of the liver fat
packed on the sleigh

with blubber, antler
picks for digging roots

fishhooks scooped mush,
ox horn for clearing snow.

The women doze, babies
asleep at their nipples,

half dazed by light, wanting
sun they can feel on their

bellies. The men dream
fat caribou, sweat

*

following the river, they carried
slate blades, knives inlaid with

ivory. Needles in a skin

needle case. No one knows where

they first found iron.
They moved with the

stars, entered their houses
from the west. The thin layer

of bones and ash frozen in the
moss floor suggests

no one stayed long
the children come home less and less

old men who dream in Ukrainian
are buried in fur under cold
white grass

the first new cash crop,
ground-up buffalo bones

log houses fall down in the wind,
not old enough for a museum

 

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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