selected poetry
I am its daughter.
This is the pilot prudish and shy
who knows the where but not the why
who falls ungraceful from the sky
and goes like soda, flat.
This is the soldier riddled with shot
who knew what he was and now is not,
a place where unmarked microbes rot,
killed in viral combat.
This is religion where you can feel
the trust you had was never real:
the crust that’s left from Jesus's meal
you eat, at the last, alone.
These are the acts that make hearts weep
the facts that fill them with snow so deep
their course through nightmare they cannot keep
and turn, by turns, to stone.
This is a country creamed with a fist
the cost of torture, a watch on the wrist
This is the well wherein he pissed
and poisoned the water.
This is a prison of private disgrace,
its seas like boils on the fuehrer's face,
a land that nature will soon erase:
and I am its daughter.
-Lyn Coffin
LOOK AT THE STARS
(poem for a high school graduation)
When I was a high school graduate, roughly three
hundred years ago, my father took me
to Paris. I don’t remember the sights we
saw— the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower.
All I recall is one evening hour,
walking with dad on the Champs Elysees,
how he pointed up at the night sky to say
the one French sentence he sort of knew:
”Regardez les etoiles dans le ciel.”
You’ve changed what you think, where you go, how you run,
when you speak, who you are in the public sun,
and you feel new when the night has burned
and turned to cinders the day’s disguise.
You’ve learned much more than you realize yet,
more than the facts, most of which you’ll forget,
more than the theories you’ll need to unravel.
Sitting in classrooms, you learned to travel.
See , and the obvious truth will come clear:
you’re each a gift, it’s amazing you’re here...
But since there’s no “other,” no “them”— just “we,”
drown your demands in the depths of the sea
like pirated treasure in tangled kelp:
our world is in trouble; we need you to help.
My father’s French sentence sounds silly, it’s true,
but it’s still the present I offer you: “Regardez les etoiles,” or try—
wherever you are, see the stars in the sky.
Observe the chill beauty of stellar space,
the cohorts of clarification above;
then warm to the beauty of our human place,
eyes you look into, looking back with love.
-Lyn Coffin
THE CHAMBER WHERE HEAT IS TRAPPED
Walking hard on a stone beach, both of us
(as we joked) literally around the bend,
we came to where once upon a time a cliff
collapsed-- the wreckage of what had been
a cottage with a view-- and you began
naming what there was to see, recalling
old brands and invalidated functions
with a doer’s, a maker’s, a lover’s
nostalgia, while I stumbled on, hypnotized
by the forked flickering in my mind
of old emotion, cold event. “This was
part of a wood-burning stove,” you said. “Here,
at the heart, is the chamber where heat was trapped.”
You showed me where smoke had parted company
with itself, becoming as circular and
lazy as recrimination— “Oh, and look,”
you said. “That two-horse Little Giant motor!
I think it could still be hooked up, and made
to run.” “Right,” I agreed. “If only
the garage, the cottage, and the cliff it stood on
weren’t gone.” You tried to hold me then, but
I had read the writing on a crumbled wall,
and asked again what time your plane would leave.
-Lyn Coffin
GOD SPEAKS TO US
God speaks to us in schoolmaster claps,
erasers of thunder, parabolas of shock.
Chinese kites high over cliffs no one
has fallen off of yet are first of all
swooping birds that skim the sea of
childhood, then the “all-at-once I’m 17
and old enough to ride the roller coaster”
sign…. Don’t watch or read or listen to
the news any more unless you want to
feel grim and ghostly: try the winding
tunnel of love or wander through
the Victorian haunted house of gabled
intentions and dilapidated desire.
At this appalling hour, our representative
is a chrysalis waiting for rebirth in a white
nightgown— resurrected as a young
Bette Davis, she will descend the curving
staircase with a candle that pins our
shadows to the wall. We in the audience
must do more than pray must rebel must
be violently unviolent must speak out
-Then and only then we’ll know- that
when she falls as fall we all must,
she won’t injure herself, she won’t be
the center in a petaling of corpses or
anyone’s house of cards on fire—we know
she will establish herself as mistress of
the brief collapse, and make it to a gentle
decrescendo, not a Hollywood cheat
but an ending we can all embrace as
far in the future, and wildly happy.
-Lyn Coffin
The Reception Line
Last night, I dreamt about Aunt Percy,
the spunky alcoholic I so loved for
being who she was—funny and flawed.
Leaving a bar one night when she was young,
she rammed her car into a back road bridge abutment,
then made her way in heels to the closest farm
and called the police, complaining that someone
had moved the bridge. Aunt Percy, old, was in
my dream’s reception line: she offered apricots:
cold and sweet. “Aunt Percy,” I said, you look
wonderful. “But thin,” she said, and it wasn’t good.
A question came up: someone in the family
needed immediate help. “Don’t worry,”
I said, which is almost always a mistake.
I think dream-talking with the dead may be
a sign my own death’s not far off, and
little time left for me to tell it
like I think it is, which is the farthest
honesty can take us while we breathe.
In the dream, I spoke to my father,
and was glad to see him looking well.
The last real time was in a Scottsdale hospital:
I went in as soon as the nurses were done
with bathing and shaving and feeding him.
Garbled as he was, he got out my name and
rumbled something about “feet” and “cold.”
I rubbed his feet till he signaled me to stop,
left a picture of my mother by his bed,
and walked back to his nearby empty house,
meaning to return after lunch. I was
hardly in the door when the hospital called…
In the dream, my father, too, was standing in
the reception line: he looked happy and
healthy. I said I was glad to see him. Then,
I added, speaking from someplace deeper than
memory, “You’re my father, among other things.”
When I woke up, I knew: my father’s love
was like a ship and the ship wrecked and
went down and wood floated to the shore of
the island of my life, and I picked up
all the timber I could and used it for
fires when the nights were cold.
When we die, it doesn’t matter what we had,
only what we did. You may, like me,
be so close to the edge,
your feet are beginning to get cold.
Your dead, too, may have formed a reception line—
and so many in our family need immediate help.
-Lyn Coffin
From This Green Life: New and Selected Poems (Transcendent Zero Press, 2017)
EDGE POEM
Is love a sustainable passion, a shared solitude, or
a web for learning new ways to fail? Yes. Sky through the door-
way is just a high place to fall from, but a delicate girl
is dangerous. Holding a pomegranate like a grenade, she’ll
wake you up to who you are. Your love for her will cost you
everything. I don’t think you need to know more than that. Too
much knowing changes the outcome of event: it’s an old way of
pulling things apart- tearing the fabric so you go from place to
place without getting anywhere- and feeling is a form of
non-linear progression, a fact-finding trip to a place where
no one can live. But if you name what isn’t there, you possess
it like a bee owns honeycomb, or a rabbi owns the Talmud,
and all there is to see or say is a gift. Writers sustain their
passion by writing, readers read to share their solitude. Oh, Yes.
*
November 17, 1917
WELCOME
TO MONTDEVERGUES
asylum for the cold, the insane,
the inconvenient
They say I'm lucky to be here.
I who used to
have a name
**
The war to end all war
rages outside
I am safe
within these walls of stone
***
You’ve come to this asylum,
but not to trade places
I am safe but you are free
You have come to tell me
what I already know.
****
RODIN is DEAD
Long live RODIN
*****
The first time I saw Rodin, he gave me a word test, "Say two nouns quickly!" I answered and he took me as his student there and then.
******
Later, when Rodin and I first made love
he told me future sculptors favored
abstract/human combinations
*******
I had answered “Death” and “Maiden.”
********
I tickled his left testicle
tickle tockle tickle
and I asked
*********
“Of the two-- Death and Maiden-- which is human, which abstract?”
**********
Alone with Rodin
I could never THINK
IMAGINING
his hands
on my breasts
like
milking spiders
***********
So when I fled to the studio along the Paris streets and found him there
I sank to the only ground from which I knew I could not fall and said— “Auguste, I lost the baby. I was going to the bathroom when it dropped down into the Paris sewer. I heard it cry out when it landed in the moving muck. I heard it. I heard it when it landed. I heard it."
************
“Ah, you took something,” Rodin said.
"Ah, of course you took something."
"Of course," Rodin said.
"Of course."
"Ah."
*************
“Of course you took something," Rodin said.
"Poor Camille. How dreadful.
How very dreadful. Very dreadful, indeed.
"You must have thought
life as we know it was coming to an end.”
**************
"Poor Camille."
"You must have thought
life as we know it
was coming to an end."
He never understood
***************
life as we know it is always coming to an end.
****************
Before he spoke, I saw his face
SPLIT WITH A SMILE
SPLIT WITH A SMILE
of RELIEF
a smile of RELIEF
WARRANT for the DEATH of
everything
*****************
he was grateful because he thought me guilty of the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
the murder of our child the murder of our child the murder of our child
******************
I meant to say nothing
to be truthful
*******************
Let me close now with a benediction
********************
BENEDICTION
Imaginary God
Imaginary God
Imaginary God
tormenting and tormented tormenting and tormented and
tormented and tormenting and tormented and tormenting
and tormented and tormenting and tormented and all in
the name of love
the name of love
the name of love
the name of love
the name of love
have mercy on our
souls have mercy
on our souls have
mercy on our souls
so human
so abstract
so human
so abstract
so human