The 13^th WR

LIKE A DARK LANTERN

i move thru the first
floor at 3 am, past
the cat who is curled
in a chair half made
of her fur, turning
her back on air
conditioning, startled
to find me prowling
in the dark as if I was
intruding on stars and
moon and the ripple
in water that spits
back the plum trees.
Ducks waddle up to
the deck as if my skin
going rose was the sky
about to shower bread
crumbs at them. The
tangerine drips. The
grass smells grassier.
The clock inches slowly
toward the light. The
creak of wood and the
soft scratch on the new
Persian rug the cat claws
gently merges with some
night bird I've never
seen like a poem that
goes along and suddenly
at the end, like a banked
fire, explodes into the
wildest flame that finishes
off everything that has
come before it perfectly

ON THE FOURTH DAY AFTER THE NEWS

John Denver falls out of the sky
like Icarus, while someone
miles away was making bread
or love. I read of the man who

called Monserat, the blue
island of lilies, put a gun into
his heart as I shake, still at the
news: mitral valve, operation,

urgent and think how ordinary
and magical the before everything
exploded seemed. I want us to
just watch the geese, drive thru

the blaze of leaves, upstate New
York and not wonder if it's
for the last time, have the way
this last long spring of azaleas

and lilies and not have the way
you grinned "flowers, flowers,
flowers," feel a relic, exotic
as blue amber under iridescent

light, not feel my own heart
thumping, waiting, a whole new
vocabulary, how valve now
isn't on the car, the Roosevelt

spa. I think of the CPR Annie
doll I slashed before I learned any
CPR when the man I was with
was having an affair, unsure,

howling, think of my father with
his white nitro pills. Going
over the news, I'm numb and limp.
I could be one of those Annies.

- Lyn Lifshin