For several years I've lived between two houses.
When I think of a typical day in my glass-and-wood house that no one believes was actually
built in the 50's, I think of the light through stained glass, the cat, starved, rubbing
against the cobalt, amethyst and jade lampshade, a luscious green shadowy light. Last
weekend squirrels woke me up there, already scrambling along the walnut branches. I think
of loud rain, nuts crashing against stone, a train in the distance. Now I long for
mornings when the cat couldn't wait to leap up to the window, the counter where, these
last months, she can only get to if the dishwasher door is open and, even then, she's apt
to clunk down in the corner between that door and the cupboard where I spent hours with my
mother the night the plane crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, and I saw her bones sticking
up out of her clothes and knew what I didn't want to know was coming.
Up in that house, where I am when I'm not here in Vienna (where I'm writing as I so
often do on in the metro on my way to ballet), one constant seems that, though I am not in
love with cooking, mornings start with grinding coffee beans and feeding or coaxing my
green- eyed Abyssinian cat, Memento, to eat one of several cans of food I'll tempt her
with during the day. A year ago I thought she was dying. It kept reminding me of trying to
tempt my mother to just try this in her last days. In Niskayuna I bring a cup of
coffee upstairs, write in bed a couple of hours, the phone off the hook, no voices. Today,
looking for a book to fill an order (not exactly a daily ritual, but I do have a list of
books available, and since no one can find them in book stores, not even in used book
stores, I am glad to get them out), I came across a chapbook diary of my work on my
collection of women's memoirs, Ariadne's Thread . In writing a memoir for Gale Research
Series for Contemporary Authors, On the Outside: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace, I thought
the past became most real for me through letters I'd written and photographs, rather than
diaries. But just skimming through this little book called Lobster and Oatmeal (my
first choice for the dairy and journal collection), I'm amazed how wrong I was about
diaries, my diary: the selections from August 7, 1980, to October 31, 1982, a day before
my deadline, make the time so vivid. June 30, 1981 starts: I love this early time of day,
phone off the hook, light through the leaves. . . I read this after writing what a typical
(good) day is. It's full of things I've forgotten, like a letter from Sylvia Plath's
mother about Sylvia's diaries.....where is that now? Somewhere. . .probably, as I wrote on
June 30, 1981, in the papers, typed-up notebooks, manuscripts, interviews crammed into
boxes. . .
Several years ago Mary Ann Lynch and her film crew came to my house to do a documentary
film: Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. They planned to begin the shoot with what
would have been a typical day: get up, grind the coffee beans, feed the cat. Instead of
sweats or jeans, I was wearing a long, plum velvet sweatshirt-like dress, now in a closet
down there in the room overlooking the pond where I saw a "real" banded goose
from Fly Away Home one January and where, in a few minutes, I'll go to feed six
three-week-old goslings. That first morning with the film crew, we walked through the
morning ritual a few times. But that start of a typical day never got on film. All was
ready. The director said, "Whatever happens, just keep on going. Never look at the
camera." The windows were gelled, the house was full of huge machines, everything
transformed, the beans in the grinder. The crew was a room away, my cat suitably hungry,
and we began. "Lights, Camera," and then, just as someone called
"Action" and the clackers cut the stillness, the cat leaped up, terrified, into
the coffee beans, spilling them, even into the dining room in her escape. I just stood
there frozen, staring at the camera, the flecks of cat food scenting the air. Memento hid
under the bed the rest of the day. So this daily ritual never got in the film. I'd love to
see the out-takes. My cat never did (and still doesn't) like strangers around.
When I was a child, I dreamed of being a ballerina. I wanted long, skinny legs you
could see light thru, not plump thighs that would rub against each other as if too shy to
stride around on their own. In Middlebury, Vermont, a calendar town of 3000 (Life
Magazine always came to take photographs of the white Congregational Church when it
snowed), there was ballroom dancing but no ballet until, for a short time, an exotic woman
from France who had danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet taught Saturday morning
classes. I probably still have the tiny blue and brown taffeta checked recital costume in
a suitcase near the fireplace on Appletree. My mother used this valise when she went to
college at Simmons and Maryland College for Women, maybe even to elope. I imagine the
peach satin teddies, (her nickname) she really bought for the man she couldn't marry and
then packed as the spirea and yellow roses were full of June. She was leaving for a
marriage (that would happen too fast for her to think about and back out of) to a man from
a family of brothers she heard made good husbands. I imagine that night from her stories
and from a box of letters that I found recently from the man she left, a trigger for a
group of poems in Before It's Light.
My house on Appletree, dark and wood paneled, is full of ghosts and many of them sneak
into poems. My mother's pocket book is in the closet, as if after 9 years she'll get out
of the hospital bed she died in and want to go out and shop. There are over a hundred
boxes, maybe more, of literary magazines from the mid-sixties to now, every letter I wrote
my mother, photographs from my first days on Hill St., Barre, Vermont, to snapshots from a
week ago, photographs of gone lovers, dead relatives, dead cats. My wedding gown is packed
in the garage, along with my baton, softball mitt, my mother's pogo stick, her mah-jongg
set, a chandelier that hung in her dining room, shells, smooth glass pebbles from a
4-year-old, now with her own children, all the books I had as a child, my drawings my
mother hung on walls. There are drawers of angora and cashmere (they had to be, they were
checked, a touch on your shoulder) sweaters from sorority rushing in college, an old doll
that turned dark in the sun on vacation. Every shelf, every drawer haunts: old diaries,
jewelry, posters, news clips, a black scarf of stars my mother gave me one Christmas Eve,
paintings, videotapes of readings, a samovar and tapestries from my grandmother's house.
On a shelf in my kitchen there are old ballet dolls, prisms, a chestnut from Versailles, a
silver horse yanked from the crushed grill of my Mustang, a "wild women don't get the
blues" button. The other day there I saw ivy coming through the floor boards as it
did in one of the most difficult years. Nothing in that house isn't throbbing with
memories. And there's little in that house that isn't connected with writing, and the
garage, too full of paper and magazines and books to put a car in, full, as I said in the
introduction to Not Made of Glass, of "musty, moldy carbons,
diaries whose wire spiral spines tangle and clot, posters, photographs, workshop
exercises."
Here in Vienna, when I'm not traveling, mornings start with that shot that didn't get
into the documentary: the coffee, the cat. Most mornings now, though, I am in the shower
by 8am and out the door an hour later for ballet. Those classes I longed for as a child I
now have nearly every day, though I miss desperately the long mornings to write. But I'm
obsessed with dance, too. In planning film shots for Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass,
the filmmaker wrote, "the more I discuss with her what other possibilities there are
for scenes, the more it comes down to the fact that nearly everything she does, except for
ballet and movies, is related to poetry."
Lately I want to pare away everything not connected to work and work to numbness; not
to numbness exactly, but to feeling I am getting what I need done so I can go to the pond
and feed the geese or photograph herons. Time seems the one thing I can't get enough of.
Of course, if I didn't spend as much as 11 hours some days coming and going to dance, I
might not feel as if I never could touch down. A year and a half ago, to save time, I
stopped sending out poetry submissions unless invited, changing what had been a daily
ritual: noting acceptances, sending bio notes, keeping track, resubmitting rejected poems.
I was ecstatic when Black Sparrow wanted to do a series of my books. I've been fortunate
in having many supportive publishers. Often when I travel to read and teach, people know
my work from magazines more than from books even though I've published over a 100 books
and chapbooks, and until review magazines cut back drastically on reviewing poetry books,
especially small press poetry books, my books were well reviewed. Because I wanted to be
sure I had many new poems for a new Black Sparrow book, in January, 1998, I began typing
up but, for the first time, not printing out, let alone sending out, poems. There were
disks and disks. In late July of '98, asked if I could have a new book manuscript by the
end of the year, I began working full tilt on going through those disks. In the past, I'd
selected book manuscripts, or an editor or publisher did, mostly from poems that had
appeared in magazines, a first edit really. In many ways, this was scary. I had never
selected poems no one had seen. Seeing some of these poems quoted in Black Sparrows'
just-out catalogue is a relief.
All fall I cut and cut, then I cut within the sections of the new book, looking for
variety and strength. Finally, close to the middle of December, after more juggling and
more revisions, I got the book in the mail. Though exciting and fun, putting any book or
anthology together is consuming. It's like teaching, something I've done a lot of. The New
York Museum often asks me to design workshops to accompany an exhibit: The Holocaust,
Mothers and Daughters, the American Urban Ghetto, Feelings about War, Mirrors etc. It can
take up to half a year to prepare for these workshops, always ending, it seems, with me
writing many poems on the subject. (That is how Blue Tattoo, my collection of Holocaust poems, grew, as
well as a series of Mirror poems and some still untyped poems about runaway children, the
homeless, the disenchanted.)
I was sure I'd have a lot more time once the mail wasn't overwhelming. I want to type
up the backlog: 80-100 handwritten spiral notebooks that go back to 1991. But it still
seems I'm clawing for time. I no longer keep a diary, don't write down dreams as I always
used to. I don't have time to read under the velvet quilt, work, then go out for ballet in
the evening, and work again when I get home. Writing has always been only a small part of
what takes all my time: there's the typing, arranging readings, promoting readings and
books, writing letters. I haven't started using a laptop on the metro, but I am set on
getting caught up, or by the time I get to some of the poems, they'll seem to have been
written by a stranger, hieroglyphs.
Getting the new Black Sparrow catalogue with its description of Before It's Light reminds me I need to get news of its
coming publication, since I'm not publishing so widely and wildly, without the chance to
mention it in a bio. Black Sparrow does a small hard cover edition of their books where
each author does something unique with a poem. Calligraphy, painting. I used to paint, and
for Cold Comfort I watercolored a
xerox of a photograph. I would like to try something more ambitious for Before It's Light: oils or watercolors, but I need a
stretch of time like a beach with no prints on it. I'm wild for more time to just gaze out
at the pond, at the walnuts, let what's outside, like the rush of Otter Falls, move
inside. Today, here in this house, in this guava and blood light moving from the water a
few feet away turning the walls raspberry, there's less of the past. But in a minute, I'll
jump back in the shower for the second and third ballet class today.
* *
It's about 4:15, June 4. I'm back on the metro, the second time today, for this hour
trip into D.C. It is obsessive, this ballet and body sculpture binge, but it's better than
drugs or booze. Two days a week I have only two hours at my desk between classes. One day,
I'm out from 9am to 10pm. Walking past the pond, I thought it would be nice just to read
in the shade, get a start on a manuscript I'm getting paid well to look at. But I'm going
east on the orange line. As I said, I write a lot on the subway. Once when I was asked to
teach a workshop on sensuality and sexuality for women, I read erotica and porn during
rush-hour, wrapped the books in other book jackets so people crushed up close to me
wouldn't press even closer, seeing Susie Bright or The Story of O. One day the book I was
reading wouldn't fit in the jacket I usually used. Only a book on cooking steak worked,
and the mix of porn and grilling turned into a few wild poems on their own. One is in Cold Comfort , another will be in Before It's Light.
If I hadn't spent time down in Virginia, I wonder how different my work would be. The
first year or so in DC, I went to museums every day. All of my book, Marilyn Monroe Poems , written in a few weeks the first
October I was here, came out of what and whom I saw while wandering around the city,
reading the paper, missing upstate and feeling, as I always do, even more intensely an
outsider. Wherever I went that almost whole month of October, Marilyn or poems about
Marilyn followed.
* * *
Riding in, past Clarendon, I'm thinking how I have to plan readings, book signings;
there seems never to be a time I don't feel I have to hurry. In high school I pressed
myself to win art and science contests. Every year I worked hard on a scientific display,
more art than science: a giant papier mache model of the eye, models of carbon molecules.
I should just take a break, go to Europe, but no one else can give my cat pills or fuss
over her while she's eating. Another project I won't get to today is working to get my
papers in an archive. Not only upstate is full of towering boxes of magazines and paper;
here, too. The garage, the floor, too many rooms: workshop material, handwritten notes,
notebooks, hard copies, fax machines, printers, little red lights blinking in every room.
Unless I'm traveling, I hardly need more than sweatshirts, a denim mini skirt, boots and,
of course, leotards and ballet slippers, but my closets bulge with too many clothes, too
much velvet, and too many unused leotards. I got into ballet when, living alone after
divorce, I'd work for hours and forget to eat, living on coffee. After sitting at a desk
for hours, I needed more. I started ballet with one class from a bad teacher who billed
herself as a several-time Miss Vermont; then I began classes with a real dancer with whom
I collaborated: workshops combining ballet and journal writing, performances using my
poems, her choreography. Now it's almost daily, but ballet still comes as hard to me as
some probably think writing comes easy.
9pm. Waiting for the metro is a great time to watch people. Usually on this trip back,
I read short stories; they're dessert. It will be dark when I get to Vienna. Probably
there will be oval shapes on the pond, geese in the ripples. I still haven't figured out
exactly where the six goslings sleep. My tangerine tree will fill the air with a heavy
musk I'll be able to smell before I get there. The moon will come through my mother's
pigeon ruby punch bowl and turn her refinished Heywood Wakefield furniture pale scarlet.
Those maple pieces that were in my parents' rooms before I was have lived in more houses
than I have. Tomorrow I don't have to be anywhere. And now...cut grass wind, clover and
roses, the last streaks of garnet and tourmaline past the blood oaks the beaver hasn't
touched yet.
Lyn Lifshin
has written more than 100 books and edited 4 anthologies of
writing by women. Her poems have appeared in many poetry and literary magazines in the
USA. She has taught poetry and prose and won numerous awards including the Jack Kerouac
Award. Her new book is 