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MM.12:138LYN LIFSHIN
WALKING IN THE WHEAT FIELDS WITH JESUS
It was always a bad time when my husband left and it happened
over and over. I'd lose weight, grow pale. Something seemed to
telegraph pain, or how I was desperate, starved for any
one and men would line up at the door and since I was close
to falling apart, I'd gulp their vodka, their hips. My
legs looked better and better the worse things got, the last
part of me not to be what an old lover called zoftic. I
think I bought all my minis those months I was shaky,
keeping the heat down in a house I didn't think I could
keep, waking up in bed with strangers, weeping, hung
over. Panicked and then buying more suede and fur,
velvet, wild for something to keep me warm. In a discount
glove store, I felt like all those limp and empty spaces,
desperate for fingers, aching to be filled. When
Jesus came to the door, I was more than ready to
receive hi, I was spread-eagle open, I was all hole
dying to be whole. I don't know if it was my aloneness or his
scent that drew me to him--figs and mulberries and some
thing sweet, marijuana maybe. I never saw anyone walk like he
did. Later I learned he'd had some disc fused. sometimes he
stood still as if carved out of stone. He could see hunger in
my eyes I know and when he told me could save me, I fell
into his arms. Right at the landing on Rapple Drive. With
out him, he told me I'd become a loose woman, a drunk and that
bothered me. I mean while I was married, I was living like
a nun. Free, if you want to call it that, I wanted to make up
for what I missed in the sixties and I know I was cursed and envied.
Once my mother called me slut when I stayed out past the sorority
curfew tho it was years before I even let anyone's fingers inside
my dress. When a high school boy friend called me wholesome, I
was insulted. I had a lot to make up for but J.C. told me that
tho I had many lovers, he alone loved me. That took me back some.
He said, "other men love themselves in your nearness, I love you in
yourself." If swooning was still in, I would have swooned then. It
sounded divine. "Other men see the beauty in you that shall face away
sooner then their own years but I see in you a beauty that will not
fade away." when we got to the farm house, I went up stairs to the bath
room and found a blue jar of Noxema his girlfriend left behind and
smeared it over my skin. "I alone love the unseen in you . . . all men
love you for themselves. I love you for yourself," went thru my head
over and over. I still looked sexy, pretty as I hadn't as a plump
teen with pink plastic glasses. When I turned around, he was behind me,
he unzipped my leather, led me into the room with garnet blood walls
and then he was everywhere, he filled every place in me.
Poem, © 2000, LYN LIFSHIN (all rights reserved; To copy or translate this poem, please contact the poet)
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