Black Apples

by Unknown .

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead of using "Unknown".

Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

DREAM OF BLACK APPLES, WAR

Four people are
encased in a coach
that' going to be burned.
I don't know if it's relevant.
Am I one of the four?

When we wake up
some people are talking of war.
This must be the space before it happens.
The apples are frozen black my morning

You think shots 
ring out nearby.
Later the wind swells everywhere,
hurling us toward something.
By noon the bedroom is full of strangers

You are still gentle
bu never seem to want me lately
altho I'm not sure,
with all these other people

For the first time now
we are sealing the windows 
as if that could shut out the fear.
Why is it, especially now, I want your thighs
knit inside me? I'm afraid,

I wish the house would take root.
But the rooms tremble
door blast off and dissolve
I can't find you

And for once don't think how
I seem to the others,
taking off my shoes to run
barefoot on stones where the floor was

carrying a package of ruined clothes
I don't know where



NEVER THE CITY'S NAME

Coming early spring
with winter buds still frozen,
seadreamt from Lithuania,

the nine brothers and sisters
and your ten thin years and cold
Boston early March, the weather

just turning. But no words for
telling then. What were the other
reasons later when I was colouring the

crossing -- were you skimming the
water sleekly on a walrus or floating in
on a pink gull, puffing like a fat man

or on a dove's wing
flying over all the houses?
I used to wonder but you never said,

maybe remembering a place you left but
never telling except that there were
feather beds and ducks and chickens in the

distant house, tremendous pines.
But all the years we shared the same rooms
as if together,

you never gave the city's name
or yourself.



FAMILY

my grandfather
in a jar of herring
waiting in back of the
movies, his
mustache full of dill

checked things
out in the
52 Plymouth he
drove to Saratoga
long after he was 80

his yellow leer
for holy days
and ladies

confided his
regrets

mostly to the 
redmaple wind



BERYL

We father in his
sister's dark house
chanting like a 
Jew. Candles,
Friday wine

Everything there had a 
peculiar heavy 
richness
flushed cheeks and
velvet, amber shawls.
A fat smell of praying

In Vermont in
rooms plain grey and
wooden
I remember his sitting 
those nights without
a word and
how he stood int he park,
listened to chestnuts dropping.
But not much else

only just now
I'm saying
Beryl, his
sleek Hebrew name,
I didn't even know
I knew it

Is that what he 
wanted back

or what?



FAMILY 8

Another uncle
was a pathological liar
but so gentle with whores,

bringing them dogs and flowers.
Law school then a cluttered
five to dime, mainly toys and
needles bu under the counter

squirting from split knees,
maiden juice it said,
just press the button.

Twelve years of Sundays
were always with the Irish girl
but secretly, that he iceblue eyes
the family shouldn't see, and

slow afternoons in the rented room
till at fifty love grew thin
so he married the rabbi's duaghter,
but he never had a son.



TWO SNOW AND RUST SUNDAYS

Snow, the colour of
rust and wind that
scrapes the old
railroad ties

No trains
anymore, just 
Sunday bells
they knock the grey
sky, smoke falling

Close to this
burred hill
whispered and now
mostly forgotten,

Patty Bissette
strangled in Boston
that winter, a
different sSunday

gone in a scream
of blood stockings

(and whose baby in her the
town kept wondering)

Snow and rust bless her

I lived here once too



WAITING, THE HALLWAYS UNDER HER SKIN THICK WITH DREAMCHILDREN

Lace grows in her eyes like
fat weddings,
she is pretty, has been baking

bisquits of linen to stuff into his mouth
all her life,

waiting for him. The hallways
under her skin are thick with dreamchildren.

Who he is hardly matters, her rooms
stay for him,

her body crying to be taken
with rings and furniture, tight behind doors

in a wave of green breath and wild rhythm, 
in a bed of 
lost birds and feathers,

smiling, dying



YOU UNDERSTAND THE REQUIREMENTS

We are
sorry to have to
regret to
tell you
sorry sorry
regret sorry that you have
failed

your hair should have been
piled up higher

you have failed to
pass failed
your sorry
regret your
final hair comprehensive
exam satisfactorily
you understand the requirements

you understand we are
sorry final

and didn't look as professional
as desirable
or sorry dignified
and have little enough
sympathy for 16th century
sorry english anglicanism

we don't know doctoral 
competency what to think and
regret you will sorry not
be able to stay
or finish

final regret your disappointment
the unsuccessfully completed best
wishes for the future
it has been a
regret sorry the requirements
the university policy
 please don't call us.



THAW

Ice comes undone 
Skin shining and
hair full of
March

girls spill out of
offices their
bones whispering strong
hands to marry

glazed orchards
and vines coming back
Green is under the snow the girls'

arms seem to open 
as if to life them past
fluorescent air
toward whatever

mysteries 
are hidden from them
Lately nearly
blinded by water and

light they'll
move a 1 o'clock wave
their hair folding
back into

rooms of
machines and paper But
no desks can
hold such

dreaming blood,
drunk on the poems
sun makes 
in their bodies



IN SPITE OF HIS DANGLING PRONOUN

He was really her favourite
student dark and just
back from the army with
hot olive eyes, telling her of
bars and the first
time he got a piece of
ass in Greece of was it
Italy and drunk on some strange
wine and she thought
in spite of his dangling
pronoun (being twenty four and
never screwed but in her
soft nougat thighs) that he
would be a
lovely experience.
So she shaved her legs up high
and when he came
talking of footnotes she
locked him tight in her
snug black file cabinet where
she fed him twice a day and
hardly anyone noticed
how they lived among bluebooks
in the windowless office
rarely coming up for sun or the
change in his pronoun or the
rusty creaking chair
or that many years later
they were still going to town in
novels she never had time to finish



IN THAT HOUSE

a film grows over
everything near them.

They want to
outlaw leaves, clasp

armour over wrists
and fingers.

Air catches in
rooms full of no,

even when they 
sleep their blood

keeps drowning.
Just watch how their

children tremble
trying to run in tight

shoes of glass
and falling



ICE MOVING THRU NIGHT WINDOWS OF BLOOD

Paint the windows
shut but 
it's no use
ice comes inside
fills those
holes in me. What
kind of a 
life is this
getting up at
3 AM,
feeling up the
night for
someone to
touch.
What kind of a
woman is it
wants a
warmth
in that close,
puts wire
around her
self you 
can't
get in there



TO BE STRUCK ALIVE BY DIFFERENT WEATHER

Dawn spills out of
slate sky. But it's a dawn of moldy words, old

fingers: colours of knives and concrete.
My skin waits

for an orangejuice sun, to be struck alive by
different weather.

Still the room drowns. He said, Baby you'd better
choose now.

Beating, beating. Under the mountain of grey
sheets, no answer.

Verbs of dust
hurt my eye. But I don't see how to

go with him.
Or how to stay in these walls I can't live in

where everything
falls with the frost-brown apples, where an

icebird keeps
banging against the window. And cries for what is

green and warm
keep bruising the glass inside my bones.



HOW IT HAPPENED

Even there
we were drawing past
one another. Even in the same city
we fell sideways, were
lips that kept
getting to places a little too early

or late. Of course, it wasn't really that
dramatic. But the way
letters were banging at rooms
where no one was living,
and your name in the phonebooks still seeming
magical. At least, real. A small mystery to eat me.

Now I have no laugh,
the way I thought that what went wrong
was geographic.
Put it this way: these crazy voices
scheme a star in the middle of
checkbooks and marriage. They glue it up with bluewood

and letters and arms and then sleep with it
tightly, move into it as deep as they can.
They go blind.
And never understand how it happened.
Or that it is already dissolving. Shadows in direct
light. Dreams. But you know that story.



SOMEDAY

Someday you will find
your possessions are not what they seemed.
A penis will sprout
out of the bathtub drain,
the chairs growing roots
deep into the carpets. Thin translucent men
will hide slyly in your furnace,
you won't be able to get them to leave
sing as many groundhog carols as you choose.
At almost the same time
worms will be sprouting from your piano
and a very large nose will come and
steal your cantaloupe at breakfast.
Isn't this awful you'll want to cry as
wool is melting to blood on your skin.
But even if you scream nobody will notice.
Could you, truthfully, expect anyone to believe it?



POEM FOR THE HOUSE BEING EATEN BY WATER

The whole house 
slants to the lake
water coming
deep on one side
up to your knees and
purple ivy
on the other
Not much else but
bleached wood
Julie and 
Rod cut
into a grey board
fuck on another
Two brothers lived here
till 1939
each in a quiet 
locked room
with no
friends
If you come over
anytime, just
don't leave
by the
back door



I DON'T WANT YOUR BLACK RIDING BONES

You take those
black hairs
of your heart,

I don't need them.

you darkness
riding my
bones

climbs stairs
in me

3 at a time.

I don't have to
keep balling midnight



PULLING OUT

First their eyes
pull toward new underwater
places, a terrible dark
gill catching her attention,

she didn't know he was like this,
heart scooped, full of glassware and
tin. But she still wants him
breathing in her

body, grows new lips and muscles, gold
mirrors in her side until he
moans that he can't stand
her spying. And their mouths fill with

stones. But they go on
anyway in this water that keeps
everything slow, his metal
penis still moving in her, the holes

in her side leak so slowly
it's hard to tell what's
lost. Only, they're
having this trouble, the floor slides

away, they can't tell where they
stand, her thighs won't
hold him. Words
come heavy too and hang

like blood sealed in plastic. Love
is certainly pealing away
and all she wanted
was something warm, green

water to flow inside her body,
smoke her heart.
But he slips from the places she dreamed
he would know, her gills are so

lonely -- yes it's just like
any movie run it
backwards see the lips pulls out, bodies
twisting upright.

Arms float without any direction.
Salt comes and it's
all shell and separation,
love jerking down their throats, hooks

and weeds taking them, spreading in
their hair. All their reflections
breaking. Torn pieces of
her glass scrape his metal she

misses his bones but
they're both bloated from being in this
water too long
 o let's get out of

here she cried couldn't 
we live in a
mountain in a glacier on a green
stone somwehre

bu something in them has been turning
so hard clots of coral
loss so brittle
that they break, and splinter

so raggedly
nobody can touch them



EATING THE RAIN UP

 grey tuesday
rain all
night
you said do you
 want to go
 for cigarettes
 do you want to

 listen
 i've got a
 room we
 could
i've got something i want
you
 at least
we could
 talk

 tell me your name

books fell across the bed
your mustache
 was the kind, i
 wrapped your mouth
 into me
 yes i knew
 your thighs would be
 friendly, your
hair closing
 down
 small hands a pillow

 and the
 wetness we grasped
 that warm together

 ate the rain up



ON ANOTHER COAST 

Maybe
could it have
been because of
rain that we fell
together so
easily that first time
rain keeping the
others near the
dire your hair was
blacker than the melon
seeds under the straw the towels
smelling of sweet trees our
bodies lifted to each other in the
rain cottage the
wet leaves pulling us
close and down

[Eve Lyons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyn Lifshin is a master at short line poems, at using language sparingly but very evocatively. I went in search of some of her books after reading some of her poems in a poetry workshop. It is impressive and wonderful what she can do with language and images.

[Dicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading in college in 1975.
Favorite line of poetry "to be struck alive by different weather"

[Mary Schroeder · Rating 5 out of 5]

rough, tough
great