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LYN LIFSHIN ALL ABOUT ME
Have You Ever Gone Back
to where you were at 15, a
star at least in your day dreams?
You think about the people
you were with, the fat girl,
Judy Scott who did things with
boys you never dreamed of.
Imagine the middle aged in a
condo or worse. Today in the
Science Museum, I'm amazed
how young so many people
are which of course I was
with my exhibit on The Eye.
Can't you admit you'd like to
be on display in a museum like
that? Be in a wilderness diorama
or have your own exhibit not so
different from a new prize
winning book? Looking out,
I'm astonished how blue the
river is, the same one my mother
paddled down and the posed
with the man she couldn't
marry tho he signed the photo
graph "to my angel." Don't you
wonder sometimes, not just at
science parks or metros, how
very very young so many
are? I think of myself with
my science exhibit spread out,
an enormous papier mache
model eye half shouting
"Look at me." Sometimes I
can't believe I'm not still
that Rosalyn Diane, looking
ahead, as my mother must
have on the Charles, to some
one small whose name she
would hang on to her wrists
and legs and when she could
no longer hold them, go
on to write that she had
--- copyright LYN LIFSHIN ALL ABOUT ME
Most confessional poems begin with a 'person' and that 'person's recollection'; LYN LIFSHIN begins where she ends - going back to '15'.
It's a vague post-adolescent age approaching the promise of 16 (driving, hanging out, dating a boyfriend). In a very real sense the poet is asking the reader to 'go back' to another time...and, subtly, also to 'go back' to the beginning of ALL ABOUT ME series. If you follow LYNSHIN's suggestion, the Woman in Saudi Arabia becomes another kind of fantasy... that of a young woman trapped by circumstance into a restricted role.
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