Lyn Lifshin POEMS

Hardly Anyone in my Family Could Sew except my father who shortened pants customers bought at Lazarus Dept Store noon times, even afer he started with white pills under his tongue, trudged up the apartment stairs, green baggy pants for Robert Frost to wear wandering thru Main St. My mother once made me a Spanish dancer's costume but I don't remember her sewing anything else. I tried to sew a hen on a skirt for a Christmas pageant that unraveled, like so much would, on stage. For Girl Scouts 20 of us had little squares to sew into a patch work quilt. I preferred painting, working on science projects with huge papier mache models of the eye I filled with Vaseline and clear glue. Or writing poems about the apple blossoms, how dark moved in and I could almost smell it. Sewing, like cooking, had too many rules. One aunt tried to teach me to knit but I dropped stitches, awkward as someone playing piano in padded gloves thick enough for 50 below freezing. I no longer remember who made the two afghans: blue for my mother, a rainbow one for Nanny but it wasn't my mother. If a button broke, a blouse would stay that way as if there never was time for anything small or painstaking. I sewed the way I wrap a gift: as if I slapped paper and tape together, running from a burning room. You can see this today if you check out my ballet slippers. There was no Singer machine, no small girl toy version. My mother's button box just grew heavier. None of us were good at following patterns. When I tried to trace a tiny bathroom rug on a new square of pile, even that was a disaster. Some think of sewing as relaxing as yoga, almost like playing music, creative as cooking (some thing else few in my family thrilled to). I love the sheen of velvet, satin, taffeta, the nub of fleece and fur and how light ripples over the thick wine and onyx fibers and I can imagine a room of women stitching and weaving, gossiping and sewing but could never see myself in those rooms

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