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Editor's
Note
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Three
Poems by Lyn Lifshin
If
Those Blossoms Don't Come
- if
the tangerine doesn’t
fill the house with
thick sweetness. If you put your hands over your ears
one more time when I’m talking. If there’s
another month of wanting to sleep all day, the cat the
warmest sweet thing I can imagine. If this damn rain
doesn’t let up, I’m going to have to rewrite
the story you’ve got in your head about us and I
don’t think you will like the ending
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Montmartre
- Haven’t you
wanted, sometimes, to
walk into some painting, start a
new life? The quiet blues of Monet would soothe but I
don’t know how long I’d want to stay there.
Today I’m in the mood for something more lively, say
Lautrec’s Demimonde. I want that glitter, heavy
sequin nights. You take the yellow sunshine for tonight.
I want the club scene that takes you out all night.
Come on, wouldn’t you, just for a night or two?
Gaslights and absinthe, even the queasy night after dawn.
Wouldn’t you like to walk into Montmartre where
everything you did or pre-Aids with the drinkers
and artists and whores? Don’t be so P.C., so
righteous you’d tell me you haven’t imagined
this? Give me the Circus Fernando, streets where getting
stoned was easy and dancing girls kick high. It’s
just the other side of the canvas, the thug life, a little
lust. It was good enough for Van Gogh and Lautrec, Picasso.
Can’t you hear Satie on the piano? You won’t be
able to miss Toulouse, bulbous lips, drool. Could you
turn down a night where glee and strangeness is wide open?
Think of Bob Dylan leaving Hibbing. A
little decadence can’t hurt. I want the swirl of
cloth under changing colored lights, nothing square,
nothing safe, want to can can thru Paris, parting animal
nights, knees you can’t wait to taste flashing
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April,
Paris
- Nothing would be
less shall we call it what it is, a cliché
than
April in Paris. But this poem got started with some thing I
don’t think I could do but it reminded me of Aprils
and then three magazines came with Paris on the cover.
Sometimes I’m amazed at all the places I’m not,
lets say Paris since actually it’s only March but in
the magazines they are at outdoor cafes which must be quite
chilly now. And I forgot the cigarette smoke, until I see
many in the photographs are holding what I’m sure
isn’t a pen. I wondered how they can always be
eating, biting and licking something sweet and still have
the most gorgeous bodies. I wonder too how my friend, once
an actress, so maybe that’s a clue, could dress up in
scanty, naughty, as she puts it clothes for her husband
while I am sitting here in baggy jeans and torn
sweatshirts. I’m wondering if it’s because he’s
lost his job and she is trying to cheer him up. I began
thinking of Paris when she described the umbrella she
decorated with drops of rain, how she just wore a garter
belt under it. I thought of tear shaped drops of rain I
made for the Junior Prom’s April in Paris, long
before I felt the wind thru my hair on Pont Neuf. It’s
there in the photograph which I hope is more original than
the idea of the photograph because I plan to use it on my
next book. I wish I could feel what she must, dolled up,
trying to soothe this man and getting off on it. As for me,
only imagining you, the one with fingers on me, holding
me on the page of a book could make me as excited
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