Lyn Lifshin

Survivor

There were no tombstones. I didn't
know where my father was. It got colder.
Then we were rounded up. Cattle cars.
When we got to Auschwitz I was holding my
mother so tight. Then they told my mother

go to the left, sent me to the right. I
wouldn't go. Then a soldier came with a big
gun. I said I wanted to go with my mother.
He hit me so hard with the rifle I fainted.
I never saw my mother. Then, I'm with some

women. They tell us to take off our clothes.
We couldn't understand. What does it mean,
"take off our clothes?" Then they said they're
going to shave our heads. Nobody said anything.
They said "a shower." Nobody talked, nobody

screamed or cried. We knew shower meant
gas. We took orders. Whatever they said,
we just did. We looked at each other. No
tears. Then, we saw water and when
water came out we cried, that's when we cried

That First Weekend With Jesus

It was a miracle how my eyes
went from red and puffy to those
of a doe's. And he did it. It
was his touch, how he held me
and entered me. After the third
time, as we sipped honey and tea,
he told me his words were the
throbbing in my own heart, (not
to mention a little lower.)
I was vulnerable, true, but it
seemed he knew everything, got
in deep as those scabies mites
that we'd have to boil blankets
and coat ourselves with white
salve to get rid of. Since it
was Christmas, when I first came
to his rooms, pine and candles
glowed, light like some other
worldly light around his body
and everything was stars. We
ate figs and hazelnuts near
the fire as the animals made
a circle around the house:
deer, pheasants, wild turkeys,
fox and horses with the cats
and dogs nesting on the bed.
He played Layla and Lou Reed,
stood up on a table as if it
was an altar or a platform in
some Roman square singing along
with Jimmy Buffet. He told me
amazing stories about whales
coming up the Hudson with a
man living inside one, how a
wick of blubber would burn
700 days and nights, of
syringa in the front yard so
sweet one petal perfumes a
whole country. He told me he
planted the Rose of Sharon
because he knew my real name
was Rosalyn years before I
was born. It seemed incredible
but his words were something else.
There was a story about an
invisible army and horses and
chariots. To say that first
Christmas was supernatural isn't
even enough. Later I'd scrub
dried spaghetti off plates
but that whole first week,
Oh Lord. I couldn't believe
so many Sundays would be with
him, driving downstate with
my just washed hair to the house
without walls, torn glass in
the yard glitter. So many
Sundays kneeling in in his yellow
robe, apple wood burning, to have
him do what he wanted
me to do to him under the
old blue quilts the swollen
cats would have their babies
in as we all waited for what
would happen to happen

Jesus and Madonna

He was writing poems about her when I first met him.
It wasn't only her fame--to him she was a lost
sheep, a lost sweet and he always said there but
for the grace of. He was thinking how his mother
was a madonna too and who was he to judge her.

Actually, I think he found her sexy and he
always wanted to multiply and be fruitful and even
in those days, Madonna was talking about wanting to
have a child, wanting the perfect father. To come
out of one madonna and enter into another would

be a miracle I suppose. I guess I was a little
jealous. I tried to convince myself he was
attracted to her because he wanted to saved her
and there was a lot to save her from. I know
someone said, maybe in People Magazine, that

when J.C. cured a blind man, let him, after years
of darkness, see the light again, he didn't want
anyone to know he did these miracles but somehow
it got out. I think he planned this. In fact, it
was probably Madonna's fame that got him going after

years of being all over the world in his mother's arms
on stamps as the baby Jesus, now, handsome and strong--
all the women said it, and smelling so nice too, a stamp
where he's in the arms of another madonna might bring
out the national Enquirer, rekindle the fervor of those

early days. Even Night Line and CNN would spread his word,
in English and 52 languages and Leno and Letterman would
fall prostrate before him, kidding his feet on the air