Before It's Light:
chapter: Want-Hair, Dreams of Flight
                (the Peruvian mummy, Leda, and
                            the woman who loves maps)

 

Want-Hair

Peru’s Ampato Ice Maiden, believed to be about
500 years old, found near the summit of 20,700 ft.
Mount Ampato, was probably offered as a
sacrifice by Inca priests

My hair begs for your fingers even thru the glass.
Don’t lean too close the sign says as if I,
the ice mummy, could contaminate you while
it’s the other way around. Once I had
egg shell skin they sacrificed even before

I needed what you call tampax. In my village,
we braided cocoa leaves between our thighs or
were called the re-legged women. Red’s
always been a favorite color in my town. See
how it glistens thru the weave of my wrap.

I’ve want-hair people still murmur, it’s like an
instrument begging to be played, aching
for your fingers. I read lips thru the fog of my
refrigerated case. My hair is what’s left,
what I most wanted to fill with night’s jasmine

and the sound of Java birds. My braids never
frizzed in the jungle or dried out at Cuzco.
Sometimes I dream it is my mother’s hair,
unbound, as she never was, flowing and free,
as taboo as it would have been for her to save me.

Come closer, you can see your own face in the
shine of my onyx. I used to wonder if the man
who smashed my head into the rocks first
saw his eyes in that black mirror, if he could smell
the apricots I washed it with, if, like a body

falling into the river, his own face
crumbled with mine

 

The Ice Maiden Mummy’s 97th S.O.S.

When I was born
my mother said there
was a birthmark in
the shape of a tear,
an omen, a warning.
But what could a
woman 500 years ago
in Peru do. Soon this
long black hair
many cherish covered
it. Still, when she
held me she said she
held sadness, as if
she knew, later, she’d
never have a truce
with herself, as if
the mark was a tattoo
of loss. I hardly
remember the smell
tho I rode many years
close to her skin.
When they took me to
be sacrificed to the
mountain, she didn’t
follow all the way or
even come but ran,
pure terror and rage:
how else could she
have let go of all
that mattered

 

The Woman Who Loved Maps

Not for accuracy, she is tired of facts and distance,
longitude, unless it’s carved out in aquamarine
and violet. She doesn’t want carefully engineered, exact
miles, doesn’t want to leave the draped rooms old

parchment and linens are spread out in, throws out her
AAA map, her Frommer’s, her Michelin, doesn’t want the
careful blotches, the interstates but loves those old
picture maps where flying monsters with lavender wings

inhabit islands mysterious as Rorschachs or hieroglyphs
almost too devastating to read. She wants what shimmers,
intoxicates like velvets and old Persian rugs. It’s too
exhausting to pack and unpack. She doesn’t want to find her

self stranded in Istanbul or Tangier in the rain and
no taxi. It’s easier, she tells herself, to love maps than
men who’ll roll away from the pillow, whispering “for her
own good,” or “it wasn’t you, it was me.” She wants to run

her fingers over their pale tourmaline and rusts, old as
teapots from Persia, the oldest Venetian glass. She doesn’t
want exact latitudes but what is mysterious as a room behind
drawn lace, lips she won’t have to do laundry for, aches for a

country in the shape of a fly-blue fish washed with lemon,
something she can date with one glance, something from
the fifteenth century. Not what folds up, can split along
the crease, but what she can lay smooth in a locked flat
          drawer

or roll up to have there in the dark just for her

 

The Woman Who Loves Maps(1)

lusts for the old ones,
no computer maps with their
crisp trail of exits
and entrances, no

.com guides with
blotched hotels, what
you should see. She
lusts for maps with

tinctures no one still
knows how to make,
madder of roses that
don’t still grow,

a wash of lime, myrrh,
abalone. She’s a woman
who’s been around,
she’s had her cravings

and now it’s for maps
she can plunge into the
mysterious shapes of
islands that didn’t

exist, more lush, more
tempting. She wants to
spread the maps above
her on her bed like

lovers she can taste,
let lure and then lock
back in drawers there
is only her key for

 

This December

A swan moved into the house, camouflaged
among geese. She must have been, or the
mist from the pond blurred her. I say her
because her antics never seemed male. Never
threatening, but coy. And never loitering
on my side of the bed. I suppose she was
cold or starved. This year, the pond froze
early. When I think back, I remember a white
feather on the deck but that wasn’t so strange.
The tangerines were gnawed before they were
ripe. It could have been crows or gulls I
told myself after the space between my lover
and me in bed got wider. He thought this
whiteness was lovely as he had psychotic
ballet dancer lovers who became swans. The
quilt’s full of feathers he’d insist when a
pale wreath of her circled the sheets. I thought
it was more like something wild staking territory.
It wasn’t that we really saw her though it is
clear the cat did. She was more of a presence
and haunting as a dead love whose handwriting
lures and chills. I felt her watch him. She
knew his moods, each move and had more time to
plot seduction than I did. Being unattainable
didn’t hurt. He felt her breath and his blood
couldn’t sleep. Drugs hardly helped but for
once, he didn’t mind not sleeping. When he turned
up music too loud for me, she moved into his arms
downstairs. I kept typing. I could feel her legs
sprawled open like a dancer with a miracle 180 degree
arabesque, hardly human, a wild open grin. Crumbs
and bread disappeared. There were more feathers,
it was like a mist and the moon was hazy through her
as if a storm was coming. Once when I opened an old
quilt from Odessa the room filled with its snow.
Some days seemed as opaque. The day the pond froze
for good the house felt somehow different. The cat
stopped being spooked. A downstairs window looked
splintered but then I saw it was only frost etched
in what looked like hieroglyph, something in a
language I don’t know. I vacuumed up the last
feathers. The stain of wings still hangs in the
air, gives the room a bluish light. Still, her
leaving wasn’t like a breakup where someone leaves
the house, packs a painting, favorite gloves but
more the way something comes apart, as it did, so
slowly it’s hard to tell when what isn’t wasn’t
still whole

 

Even Before The Pond Froze Over

there were traces, even before blood
leaves fell from the oak, the feathers
began to move closer. There were always some
in the grass the mallards and wild
geese grazed in. But these were totally

white, smelling vaguely of roses. First
I thought the scent was my own skin. Or the
tea roses in the garden. But something wilder
mixed in. I could feel a shadow, even in the
brightest light, something like me but not

me. Sometimes in the mirror, I feel her pale
eyes right behind me like a daughter I never
chose. If I knew Morse code, maybe I’d have
understood the tapping on glass at night. One
morning an envelope with no postage appeared on

the stairs and handwriting I had to put up
to the mirror to read said, “Leda’s daughter,”
and I thought of the feathers rising up
thicker, piling against lawn chairs on the deck
until the sun goes. I think of a woman raped

by a swan, her face white as lilies. Some
thing dissolving the way men melted, snow on
the battlefields in Fredericksburg. The
flutter of wings and claws become shadows,
the deepest black. Even now, this long later,

it flutters over the grass, wild to
soar above earth her mother was ground into,
to use the wings that used her, soar above
everything she’s heard the stories of to
redefine ravishing

 

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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